Nonsense Nonsense Peanuts Glue

Character Sketches

2010-10-19T20:23:00.003-04:00

I need to post something here, but I don’t really have anything substantial just now. So what I am going to do is post some character sketches for a story I’m writing.

Ulysses Juvenal Schumacher - Known to his friends as ‘Juvie’. He was an astounding athlete growing up and was simultaneously drafted by the Green Bay Packers, New York Yankees, Boston Celtics, Montreal Canadiens, and NASA. But for all his athletic prowess, Ulysses is really a shy poet who has filled dozens of marble notebooks with verse to make the gods weep. He spends most of his free time alone, sheepishly reading his books. You see, Ulysses is an unmatched genius and multi-disciplinary savant. He runs faster than Bobby Fischer and plays chess better than Carl Lewis. He paints like a rock star and he invented egg rolls. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a J.D., Ed.D., and a Ph.D. in polymathematics in just three years. He listens to music so underground, you’ve never heard of it, and he is physically incapable of hearing popular music of any kind due to a tragic, character-defining disease. His favorite musical act is the definemecore band, Schopenhauer’s Curse, a group so fucking underground that he made them up. They sound like a command from God to kill yourself. Congress has scheduled hearings.

Dulcinea Cooper - Dulcinea was the girl next door – literally – to Ulysses. He was smitten from the day she moved in when she was twelve. Ulysses was twenty-three, but that’s not fucked up and creepy because this is literature and Ulysses is both very sensitive and an extraordinary character...like you run into all the time. Dulcinea is incredibly beautiful, but in a way that only people who read this book would get. As big box stores have begun moving into Ulysses’s hometown, it has becomes his life’s mission to help to try and preserve the town’s landmarks – particularly Dulcinea’s favorite places. This is either a tragic waste, or the most noble use, of Ulysses’s talents. This will be left up to the reader.

Joey Persico - Joey is Ulysses best friend. He’s extremely normal and ordinary. His favorite band is Led Zeppelin and he works at some kind of a factory. His friendship with Ulysses shows how Ulysses can connect with regular people, even though he is so much more awesome than them. Joey is always playing with a really old yo-yo that his grandfather gave him shortly before he died because I can’t be bothered to develop his character; so this will have to suffice.

Mr. LaFleur - Ulysses’s high school English teacher. He was the only teacher who saw that Ulysses was more than a lunkhead athlete. (His other teachers were huge morons who didn’t realize that his good grades meant he was intelligent.) Ulysses has maintained a friendship with Mr. LaFleur since high school and the two often drink copious amounts of whiskey and visit the graves of dead writers. LaFleur is also one of the few people who understands Ulysses’s love for Dulcinea as he himself fucks a lot of high school students – but only over the age of sixteen – but it’s cool and all because of something about the ancient Greeks and the eroticism of teaching. It’s all artsy fartsy, highly intelligent and cultured shit, and not at all a rationalization. Mr. LaFleur and Ulysses are composing America’s first Epic Poem based on the constant beatings they receive from the uncultured fathers of sixteen year old girls they try to pick up after they get smashed on whiskey. Ulysses and Mr. LaFleur once accidentally killed a foreign diplomat with a faulty washing machine. They sold the body to a secret medical school for people who belong to the organization that secretly runs the world. This is Ulysses's one regret, and may prove his undoing.

Bob Bob Bobby Bob - Was the high school bully where Ulysses grew up and bullied the fuck out of him (even though he is this amazing athlete who could have kicked Bob’s ass...but he’s all sensitive and shit, so he gets beat up). Bob is now Ulysses’s boss somehow...even though Ulysses works for a non-profit he started...and continues to bully Ulysses as an adult. Bob represents death.

Saskatchewan

2010-09-23T15:24:00.001-04:00

Ok, this one was written for Flash Fiction Friday. Check it out. It's a good idea.

    “Why aren’t shoes ever abandoned in pairs?”

    Valerie’s tiny legs double-stepped forward – almost of their own accord – in order not to risk uncoupling from her mother’s hand. (Valerie had visited the city once before in her six years, but that time she had traveled by car straight from her home straight into a parking garage, never setting foot in the intimidating urban landscape that passed by in her window.) All these adults running on automatic pilot and not another kid to be seen, Valerie was scared that if she let go of her mother’s hand for even a second, she would be swallowed up in this evil land. But her mother’s offhand, rhetorical comment increased the passing interest she herself had upon seeing the single loafer sitting on top of the corner mailbox, and she paused just long enough to feel her arm pulled along by her mother’s. “Maybe it’s like Cinderella,” she said.

    “That was a man’s shoe, honey,” her mother said.

    “It could be a boy Cinderella.”

    “Yes,” her mother said, “it could be.”

    “Elves make shoes.”

    “Yes they do, honey.”

    “Maybe the elves take old shoes for parts to fix other shoes.”

    “Why would they only take one shoe?”

    “The elves are tiny. The shoes are heavy for them. So they only take one at a time.”

    “Hmm,” her mother said. “Maybe we should see what daddy says.”

    Valerie stared up at the endless buildings, rising up as far as she could see in some cases. She squeezed her mother’s hand harder whenever she looked up. None of the evil, impersonal, foreign things in the city could get her as long as she held her mother’s hand. A bus passed and Valerie felt herself pushed forward in its wake. She grabbed her mother’s hand with both of hers. “It’s ok, honey, it’s just a bus,” her mother said.

    A garbled voice came over the intercom in front of the building. A buzzing sound sustained itself until the door was already closing behind Valerie and her mother. Valerie looked at the narrow, wooden stairway in front of them. Her mother gently pulled her forward and to her left side now, placing herself between Valerie and the center banister. The stairs creaked under their footsteps. Valerie’s friend Carol had a deck in her backyard. The third step there creaked too. But it was part of the optimistic personality of the backyard playground. It’s creak was almost fun. The creaks in the city’s building were sickly, seemed a part of the decrepit foreboding of the evil place. And they all creaked.

    They exited the staircase through a door and entered a hallway with mint green floors which were pebbled with black and white rocks of some kind. They turned into a seating area and Valerie’s mother spoke to a woman through a sliding glass window. When they were finished talking, the woman in the window smiled at Valerie and offered her a lollipop. Valerie took it and she and her mother sat down. Valerie just held the lollipop, not opening it, still holding her mother’s hand.

    After a few minutes, another woman came into the waiting area and called Valerie’s mother’s name. “Ok, sweetie, mommy has to go for a few minutes.” Adrenaline shot through Valerie and her mother could see it in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have brought you, but there was no one to watch you today. You’ll be fine for a few minutes. I’ll be right next door.” Valerie’s mother slid her hand out from Valerie’s and kissed her on the cheek. “The nice lady with the lollipops will keep an eye on you.” Valerie looked over to the window where the woman in the window smiled. It was a very friendly, comforting smile, but it was coming from a stranger. And worse yet, a denizen of the evil place. Valerie let her mother go more because she was afraid that making a scene would make the place aware of her. So far it seemed indifferent. Except for the woman in the window.

* * *

    Valerie was ushered out of the house before she could ask her father about the shoes. Carol and her mother were waiting in Valerie’s backyard. Carol was jumping up and down intermittently. Valerie didn’t know why. Carol’s mother sat on the back stoop and kept an eye on things. “There’s Val,” Carol’s mother said.

    Valerie and Carol wandered the yard, bored, unsure what to do with themselves. This was planned. By parents. You can’t plan to have fun, you just do it. It’s spontaneous.

    Valerie’s property line ended at the edge of the woods, and her father had put up a fence when she was born for fear she’d wander off. Valerie and Carol stood on their toes and tried to look over the fence, but succeeded only in looking through the chain-links a little higher up.

    “What’s in there,” Carol asked.

    “Butler monkeys.”

    “What?”

    “Monkeys that bring you food and stuff. They live in there and there is a little school where people train them.”

    “There’s a school in there?”

    “It’s way in the back.” Valerie pointed into the woods. “My dad showed me it, but you need binoculars.”

    “Oh . . .”

    “They’re a special kind of monkey,” Valerie said. “They only live in Saskatchewan.”

    “What’s Sekchuwan?”

    Valerie pointed into the woods.

    “Have you seen any of the monkeys,” Carol asked.

    “No,” Valerie said. “I’m not allowed in Saskatchewan.”

    “We should go see the school.”

    “I’m not allowed!”

    “You can sneak.”

    Valerie considered this for a moment. “Ok, but I’ll have to ask my mom.”

    Valerie began walking towards the house. Carol grabbed her arm and stopped her. “You don’t ask permission when you sneak. You just go.” She bit her lip. “But, we’ll do it on Saturday, ok?”

* * *

    Valerie’s father had a whole bunch of papers spread out all over the dining room table when she entered. His forehead rested on the index finger and thumb of his right hand. His glasses dangled from between the index and middle finger of the same hand. The room had gotten dark, and he hadn’t turned the lights up higher as he normally would after sundown.

    “Daddy?”

    “One second, pumpkin.” Valerie’s father simply breathed in and out several times. He put on his glasses and then slowly raised his head. “What is it, Val?”

    “Do the elves take the abandoned shoes?”

    “What, sweetheart?”

    “You know, for spare parts. Do the elves take the shoes that people leave in the street?”

    Her father chuckled. “Why are you asking me this?”

    “Me and mommy . . .”

    “Mommy and I, Val”

    “Ok, mommy and I saw a shoe in the city. Just one. I thought maybe it was because the elves are too small to carry two shoes.”

    “Oh,” her father said. He smiled and sat up in his chair. “Come on over here.” Valerie ran over and jumped up on her father’s lap. “The elves can only carry one shoe at a time. But they have special forklifts. They can take both shoes when they see them. And they do. But when you only see one shoe, that’s not because of the elves.”

    “Oh,” Valerie said. She looked down at her father’s shoes, puzzling out the mystery again. “A boy Cinderella?”

    Valerie’s father chuckled again. “No, not a boy Cinderella.” He curled his lip on the right side of his mouth for a moment. “There’s this guy. A soothsayer.”

    “What’s that?”

    “Someone who can tell the future,” her father said. “And he rides around on a flying pig.”

    “How come I haven’t seen him?”

    “He flies very high. You can’t see him without a telescope.”

    “What’s his name?”

    “It’s Toby,” her father said. “Toby the Shoedropper.”

    “Does the pig have a name?”

    “Of course. The pig’s name is Pigasus.” Valerie’s father adjusted his glasses slightly on his face. “And when Toby needs to warn people that something is going to happen, he drops a shoe on the spot where the thing is going to happen.”

    “But why?”

    “Have you ever heard anyone say ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’?”

    “No.”

    “It means that something has happened and that people know something else is also going to happen because of the first thing. And the second thing is usually bad. Well, the phrase comes from Toby dropping his shoes. He drops the first one to warn people that the second one is coming. And then he drops the second one when the second thing happens. Since he does this at different times, and sometimes at different places, you usually only see one shoe.”

    “Why doesn’t he just tell people something bad is going to happen and what it is?”

    “It’s against the rules.”

    “Who made the rules?”

    “Vince Lombardi.”

    Valerie’s father stood and lifted her up. “It’s about time for bed.”

    Valerie’s father tucked her into bed and said goodnight. “I want to say goodnight to mommy.”

    “Mommy went to bed. She was very tired, sweetheart.”

* * *

    Valerie stared out her bedroom window on the second floor. She searched for Carol approaching the house. Valerie had decided Friday night not to go to Saskatchewan with Carol, but had changed her mind Saturday morning. Her father had been quiet all morning and kept pacing all over the house. He did make French toast and eggs and sausage and bacon and English muffins. Valerie only ate one piece of French toast and a strip of bacon. Usually her parents would force her to sit at the table until she ate more, but her father didn’t say anything.

    Valerie ran downstairs and out the back door when she finally saw Carol. She had expected it to be more difficult to get outside without her father noticing, but he was engrossed in a phone call when she came down the stairs. Carol had worn denim overalls, almost identical to the ones Valerie was wearing. She had also brought a green, plastic stepping stool from her house. The two girls walked quickly towards the fence.

    “Did you have any trouble sneaking out,” Carol asked.

    “No. My dad is on the phone. He didn’t see me.”

    “What about your mom?”

    “She had to sleep at the doctor’s. She has a broken gomenzingowma.”

    “What’s that?”

    “It’s next to her humperdinck.” Carol narrowed her eyes at Valerie. “It’s not a big deal, people break their gomenzingowmas all the time. My dad says they just have to give her some special medicine and fix it with a gomenzingowma wrench. We’re going to visit her later on.”

    When they reached the fence, they took a quick look back towards the house and then began. Carol went first. She stepped up on the stool and then jumped up, swinging one leg over the fence. She got the other leg over and then dropped to the ground and fell on her backside. Valerie stood on the stool and surveyed the situation. She couldn’t figure out how to get over the fence the same way Carol had. She decided on jumping and leaning forward. She began tipping over. Hanging upside down now, she twisted her body and her legs came over together and she fell flat on her back. She felt a slight buzz in her head for a moment, then she stood quickly and she and Carol headed off in the direction of the monkey butler school.

    The deciduous jungle before Valerie felt empty and quiet. Every sound she and Carol made echoed, seemed amplified in contrast. One of the wild monkeys scurried up a tree, but was invisible, rustling in the leaves by the time the girls looked up. Carol picked an acorn up off the ground and threw it into the leaves, but it went straight through a single leaf, tearing a piece off, instigating nothing else.

    “There’s no banana trees in here,” Carol said.

    “My dad says butler monkeys eat acorns,” Valerie said.

    “I never heard of monkeys eating acorns . . .”

    Carol screeched and jumped in the air, kicking her right foot. A garter snake flew up and off of her shoe and made a high arc right back at the girls. Carol ran to her right and Valerie began jumping and spinning, wildly smacking and wiping herself with her hands. The confused snake landed between them and slithered away.

    “There are no monkeys in here,” Carol said. “Let’s go back.”

    “There are so monkeys in here. We saw one.”

    “That was probably a squirrel.”

    “My dad says some of the butler monkeys have bushy tails.” Valerie began walking again, leaving Carol standing behind her. “You’ll see when we get to the school. They’ll have them in there so you can look close at them.” Carol let Valerie get another ten feet or so before running after her.

    “Wait,” Carol yelled. Valerie stopped and picked up a pair of maple seeds. She tore them apart and split open the end of one side and stuck in on the end of her nose. The other she threw up in the air and watched as it helicoptered to the ground.

    “The monkeys like this,” Valerie said. She grabbed a few more seeds and began throwing them in all directions, watching the helicopter motion all around her. Nothing else stirred. She continued with this behavior until she saw the school maybe two hundred yards away. “There it is!” The girls ran towards it and Valerie threw the rest of her seeds in glee.

    The school was in a large clearing, maybe two acres, and there was fencing behind it and to its right. The fencing was just so overgrown with foliage that it couldn’t be discerned unless one was up close. The building was made of rotting wood and was only about five feet by five feet. Inside there were only shelves, a couple of rods, and what looked like some kind of nest and a plethora of animal droppings.

    “I found them!” Valerie was awakened from her disappointment by the sound of her father’s voice. She turned and saw him running towards her. Carol’s mother was walking towards them from a different angle. “Val, honey, you scared the heck out of me. You know you’re not allowed in the woods.” Valerie stared at her father dumbly while he grabbed her up and hugged her. Her father turned to Carol’s mother. “I want to hurry back. You ok finding your way back?” She nodded.

    He carried Valerie as he walked, a noticeable limp in his gait. “Come on, we have to go see mommy.”

    Valerie looked down as her father walked. “Daddy, what happened to your shoe?”

    “I lost it in the mud somewhere. I didn’t have time to dig it out.”

    Carol and her mother walked slowly so as not to catch up to Valerie and her father. “I made her do it,” Carol said. “I don’t want her to get in trouble. Tell him I made her do it.”

    “No one’s in trouble, baby. Not today.”

The Pretty Hands

2010-09-04T13:37:00.004-04:00

So, I wrote this for a contest on another blog.

   Augie tripped over two people on his way out of the apartment. Or he may have tripped over the same person twice; he couldn’t be sure. The result in either case was a sharp jab to his calf, accompanied by an indolent “dick!” Augie jumped, startled at the shot, and knocked a few empties over. Looking over his shoulder to the three humps on his carpet – and one more on his couch – he found no further motion. The guys had come in with Curtis after Augie had gone to bed. The Pretty Hands Augie vaguely recalled. Charlie’s newest band. Curtis had played a couple of tracks they had uploaded on their site. Augie thought they were fine, but nothing to worm its way into your brain. They’d be crashing on floors for a few more months (maybe a year) and then be knee-deep in the bullshit with the rest of us, Augie thought.

   The line at the bagel shop was out the door and Augie had only thrown on a sweat shirt for the quick trip. He rubbed his biceps and tried to figure out which one or ones of the guys he had tripped over while he waited. Who had punched him. There was Ed. Or at least that’s the name Augie thought he’d heard, but Ed was a chick. Whatever her name, drowsy as it was the ‘dick’ had not been a woman’s voice. The drummer went simply by the sobriquet T. That Augie remembered for sure because he had thought it was on the borderline of idiotic. Dumb, but not so dumb he would refuse to call the person by the name. Not like the one who had wanted Augie to call him Cracker Jack. Cracker Jack was met with shrieking laughter upon introducing himself. The name was so ridiculous that Augie never heard the boy’s proper name. So Augie had been calling him CJ the rest of the night, partly as taunt, partly as dodge. Charlie Augie had known for a while now. He was an old friend of Curtis’s. Charlie wouldn’t have punched him. Not even in inebriated half-slumber. He actually had the talent to go somewhere, just not the personality. It was depressing in a way. Ed played sax – probably better than bass – but she had never been able to convince the band to incorporate it. Charlie could play bass well enough to take up duties on the occasional song, but he felt awkward on anything but a six string. On top of that, CJ wouldn’t have it. He had very specific ideas of what a rock band should be, and saxophone had no place there. CJ could be good if he ever took some time away from his showmanship lunacy. The Pretty Hands had picked him up after he was tossed out of his old band for lighting his pants on fire in the middle of a set. Augie had to admit to himself, however, that that flirted with genius from just inside the insanity side of the line. T was shit. And a shitty drummer is the ruination of a band.

   Augie called out as he walked down the hallway to his apartment door. “A’right, get up. I’m not hiding in my room all morning. I bought bagels so you can’t bitch about it.” When he looked down to guide the key into the lock, he saw a small parcel. A plain white box two inches by twelve inches by eighteen inches. He scooped it up in one smooth motion while he pushed the door open. “So what the hell is this?”

   “Plain package?” CJ had lifted his head up to look at the invading light from the hallway. “Must be another one of your dildos.”

   “Yeah CJ, you don’t know me well enough to crack that joke.”

   “Who said it was a joke?”

   Augie reached into the bag and pulled out one of the bagels and threw it into the corner of the room where it rolled through some gray dust collected there. “That one’s yours.”

   “Like I give a shit.” CJ stood slowly and went over to the corner to retrieve the bagel. He wiped it off on his shirt and took a large bite.

   No one else had so much as stirred yet, so Augie flicked on the ceiling lights and pulled opened the blinds. The light tore the balance of The Pretty Hands from their preferred biorhythms. It also exposed the modest, though well-maintained state of the apartment Augie and Curtis shared. Creaking hardwood floors stained deep brown, off white walls with yellow molding, and a hideous red, yellow, and orange carpet the roommates had picked up at a yard sale. It prevented splinters when walking barefoot in the room. But it certainly did not pull the room together. The television was . . .

   “Claire in the bathroom?” Ed’s voice came unexpectedly

   “Who?”

   “Claire,” Ed answered as she rubbed her eyes. “Charlie’s latest girlfriend.” The end of the sentence was almost yelped as Ed stretched. Her shirt lifted just above her waistline and was the first evidence Augie had that she had hips. He had been a little mad at her for failing to intrigue him the night before, proactively dressed down in drab, shapeless clothes. He forgave her now.

   “Did I meet her last night?”

   “You’d remember,” Ed said.

   “That’s a big bitch,” CJ bellowed.

   “Watch that shit.” Augie turned to see Charlie coming out from the kitchen. He hadn’t noticed Charlie’s absence. “Those bagels?” Charlie reached his hand out for the bag and Augie handed them over and nodded. “Thanks.” Charlie headed back for the kitchen, removing an everything bagel as he did. “What’s with the box?”

   “Don’t know,” Augie said.

   “Break her open then,” Charlie said.

   “Where is this bum,” CJ said, making a beeline for Curtis’s door. Augie placed the box up on the kitchen counter and pulled his keys out of his pocket. CJ banged on Curtis’s door. “Get your ass up.” Augie tore the tape on the box with one of his keys. CJ went into Curtis’s room and then came barreling out to the kitchen. “He’s not in there,” he said..

   “Maybe he went out for coffee,” Augie said as he opened the box.

   “You’re just gonna open that,” CJ asked, reaching meaninglessly for the package.

   After peering into the box, Augie turned to Charlie and said: “I think this is for you.” Charlie looked into the box. Inside were two CDs, demos that Charlie’s first band The Mugwumps had made almost eight years ago. Charlie inspected the CDs. One was titled, “Ludic Slaves”. The other was, “Mainlining on Exile St”.

   “What the . . ?” Charlie looked into the box for any further information. It appeared empty. Charlie felt his hand around the inside of the box. He felt something, a piece of paper, under one of the bottom flaps. He pulled out a wallet-sized photograph of himself. It was fairly recent. A shot that Claire carried with her. Charlie puzzled over the photograph for a moment and turned it over. “Squatters’ Paradise” was scrawled on the back in near-chicken-scratch.

   Squatters’ Paradise was the one attempt The Mugwumps had made at a properly produced album. They had pooled every dime they had and sunk it into the disc. They labored over each detail of the album, including the cover photo. They went through hell lugging Curtis’s sofa down to their old squat. The photo was of the band plopped on the couch while Curtis served them fast food, using a hubcap for a platter. It even seemed like there was some industry interest for half a minute. With nowhere left to build to, the band soon broke up. The album’s absence from the box now felt conspicuous.

   “Shit.” Charlie slipped the photo into his pocket and stormed towards the front door.

   “Where we going,” CJ asked as he threw his jacket on and followed Charlie. Charlie made no objection. Augie stared at the front door for a minute, and then grabbed his coat and followed. He didn’t know what was going on, but he was concerned CJ might aggravate whatever it was.

* * *

   Augie had closed the gap to just under a block when he saw Charlie and CJ walk into the decrepit building. Augie wasn’t used to this kind of setting and approached with caution. He had come this far, he might as well see what was going on.

   He found a window, painted over in black, with a corner of glass missing. Inside, dust-infested beams of light revealed a sickly gray scene. The bottom floor had been pretty well gutted. Charlie and CJ stood facing a third man Augie hadn’t seen before. Or rather, Augie hadn’t seen before in person. It took a moment, but Augie recognized the face, although it was less gaunt than it had been in the photographs. Joe was one of Curtis’s oldest friends, but Augie had never seen him until today. He did know that Curtis had met Charlie through Joe when Joe was drumming for The Mugwumps.

   “Where’s Claire,” Charlie asked.

   “Who the hell do you think you are,” asked Joe. “I don’t have to tell you where she is.”

   “You took her?” Charlie showed the photo.

   “Took her?” Joe stared at Charlie studiously. “Shit, you really don’t remember.” Joe laughed.

   “Fuck you laughing at?”

   “You, asshole. Claire’s my sister. You met her way back. I mean, she was only fifteen then, but shit.”

   “So, wait . . .” Charlie seemed to search the floor for something. “What is this? I mean, are Mark and Pete . . . what is this?”

   “Mark’s dead,” Joe said. “Pete’s gone. Fried. Institutionalized.” Charlie just stared at Joe. “You’d know this if you were a friend.”

   “So that’s what this is about? I abandoned you guys?”

   “No.” The voice came from somewhere outside the window’s view range. Also apparently from outside of Charlie’s view, Augie thought. Augie watched as the Amazonian figure of Claire came into view.

   “That’s a big bitch,” CJ bellowed. Augie noted that she was big, but not in the way he had expected. She was six foot two, and curved just right, but not with any excess. Attractive if viewed in a forced perspective.

   “Fuck you, CJ,” Claire said. She walked over to Charlie and handed him a what looked like a slim coffee table book.. “It’s about this.”

   Charlie studied the cover for a minute. Then he opened it and looked at something inside. “Where did you get this?”

   “Fuck you is where,” Joe said. “You were a private school kid. You scammed us.”

   “It shouldn’t matter if my dad had money.”

   “It doesn’t.”

   “Bullshit.”

   “It’s the deception. You used to disappear every few weeks. Show up again out of nowhere at one of our squats. We never knew what you were up to, but hey, none of our business. Turns out you were just ending one of your vacations.”

   “So what? You could have gone home too, you were just too cool.”

   “No, we couldn’t have.” Joe pointed an accusatory finger at Charlie. “That’s what you don’t get. This wasn’t a game for us. Play street urchin. Claire and me, we couldn’t go home. Same for Mark and Pete.”

   “I slept in the same holes as you. Begged in the same places.”

   “You’re still not getting it. You can’t fake the experience. You don’t know what it’s like if you have a fallback position. None of us had a net. You were a fucking tourist!”

   “I was trying . . .”

   “Fuck you, man. Any of us would have given anything to have your life. You go live your little poetic fantasy. Try to get some material for your songs. There’s nothing wrong with being a normal person. Now, being an asshole is another story.”

   “Hey.”

   “You didn’t even recognize me when you saw me again last month,” Claire said. “We were going to let you off if you did, you know.”

   “Let me off?”

   Charlie turned to look at CJ. “We’re outta here.”

   “There’s no we.” Charlie looked at CJ in utter confusion. “You’re a fucked up individual. You can’t mess with people like that. Explains the shitty ‘evolution’ of your lyrics though. The Pretty Hands are going on as a trio. T’s out. Joe’s in. We’ll move Ed over to vocals. Chick singer stands out. That, a little money, and a phone call to an industry connection . . .”

   Charlie waved off the group as he headed for the door. “Not going anywhere, Charlie.” The voice came from a man just entering the building. He wore a silk shirt and pressed pants, and Augie could see some kind of handgun conspicuously displayed at his waist.

   “You remember Tout Suite?”

   Augie tried to will himself to an act of heroic intervention. They won’t do anything if I’m in the room, he thought. But he watched, frozen, as Tout Suite handed a stack of bills to Joe. “Twenty grand was the agreement?” Joe nodded.

   “And a meeting with your music friend,” CJ said. Tout Suite nodded.

   “I only owed you eight,” Charlie said.

   “I’m a bitter man. Find out you could have paid me anytime you wanted. What kind of person that make you? Maybe you could have even saved poor Mark.”

   Augie watched, his mind screaming for him to both rescue Charlie and to run away. The resulting paralysis made him hate himself a little. Charlie pleaded as Joe, Claire, and CJ began leaving. “Joe, come on, man.”

   “Joe can’t do anything now if he wanted to,” Tout Suite said before he knocked a molar out of Charlie’s mouth with a right hook. Augie watched the blood begin to trickle down Charlie’s horror-stricken face and his paralysis broke in shame.

   Augie was still running when he got into the apartment and went to check on Curtis. He found him asleep in his room, out cold, nine empties on his floor.

   In the living room, the band was already gone. The only evidence they had been there was a copy of their demo. Augie looked at the package. The contact information for the band was Ed’s. Augie put the CD in the junk drawer. He would try to decide whether or not to call Ed when his thoughts weren’t dominated by Charlie screaming.

   “Joe! Joe! Joe!”

Otto and Space Shuttle Girl

2010-06-30T23:36:00.008-04:00

    Otto pressed down on the pedal that makes the car go faster with the corrugated sole of his fancy shoes from that one store. As the car careened and swerved both rightward and leftwise, Otto thought back to the store where he had bought the car. It was a blue car and it came with a spare tire and windows. The store was open in the middle of the desert when Charlie worked there by unlocking the display case. Wantonly businessing morrow and gloaming. He found it misplaced in the candy aisle behind a pack of Hubba Bubba. He brought to Charlie the ticket and said, “I want this. Blue is my favorite color please.”

    Charlie looked at Otto and thought him quickly an Otto, then briefly a Lamont, then thirdly and finally – correctly as well – an Otto, palindromicity streaming from his eyelids. “It is many and many dollars,” Charlie said.

    “Poor I am not,” spake Otto. “Many and many dollars I have, and then more enough still for cupcakes a week.”

    “Very good,” said Charlie.

    “I am very good,” said Otto. “I went to school in Orange County in the great state of California, where they make movies and surfboards. Also, the ocean is on the wrong side and sometimes people are weird. My school was on a schooner and we water skied for gym class, counting assholes for math class, and reading books about plumbing. I grew there and my father was a mechanic. For the space shuttle. My mother invented a type of cookie and sold it to a foodstuffs conglomerate, but they only bought it as a secret weapon for post-apocalyptic rich people orgies. But my mother has made them and I have had them. Until it is that the attorneys sent her a restraining order to not make them. But still I have known what it is to be rich. I met a girl in the eighth grade. She lived on my father’s space shuttle and she gave me a kiss and three string cheeses. So we had to get married. And now I need a car. My favorite color is blue.”

    “I ain’t got no receipts,” Charlie said.

    Otto had put the key in the turner onner and turned it and the car went on. He drove it with the pedal that makes the car go under his fancy shoes. He parked the car by pressing down on the pedal that makes the car stop and he opened the door that lets you get out of the car so you don’t have to live there until you starve to death and smell bad.

    Space Shuttle Girl was wearing clothes when he got home and Otto thought they didn’t look stupid. Space Shuttle Girl was six feet three from living in space. On a shuttle, as a girl. She learned how to wear clothes that didn't look stupid in outer space from absorbing radiation. She had brown hair and two eyes and one mouth, even though she grew up in outer space, even if up is meaningless without a reference point. For this reason, her height was legally considered irrelevant and she was able to ride roller coasters even when she was only three feet tall. This caused the baseball strike, and also the Miracle on Ice through a tachyon cascade.

    Otto was five foot ten and had two arms and two legs. But just the one head. This made Otto sad, except for times he saw a blue car or Space Shuttle Girl in clothes that didn’t look stupid. He also wore clothes and they also didn’t look stupid, but his clothes were a different size and shape from Space Shuttle Girl’s.

    Otto also enjoyed his job. He was a cosmologist and thought about how the universe existed and if there was enough soap for the Third World to stop having AIDS so much. This involved a lot of math and also lye. But when Space Shuttle Girl wore clothes that didn’t not look stupid, the math fell out of his head and he was only able to write literary critiques for obscure publications read by people with inferiority complexes.

    Otto and Space Shuttle Girl had a daughter named Belinda. They were going to name her Lillian after she was born, but until then after it the mail came for Belinda. So Belinda was often found at school when she wasn’t not being born and she would write down answers – on occasion – to problems mathematical and socially scientific, ranging from fractions and long division to Abraham Lincoln and the atriums and ventricles. (Although Lincoln had atriums and ventricles and sometimes used and understood fractions and long division, these were never mingled in the school classes because there could be an explosion.) Belinda once wrote an answer so beautiful that her teacher tried to adopt her and Space Shuttle Girl had to talk to the principal about the teacher’s shitty attitude.

    Otto released the pressing on the pedal that makes the car go faster because he was dying from the explosion because Abraham Lincoln discovered irrational numbers and made mad Pythagorus. Otto flew out of his car, and he was dead, and he fell on the grass that was there near where he was had been driving and he landed on it. And it was green grass. A lot of people died in the Civil War because of irrational numbers and then they made a movie about the Dukes in Hazzard because a Nazi Muslim Socialist with cooties robbed the White House and invented a new cabinet position – with his super Nazi Muslim powers (Socialists don’t have super powers) – for his Sommelier and then burned all the white lightning with a machete.

    Otto got up on his feet, which were wearing the fancy shoes that also had soles on them, and he walked over to his burning car and blew it out with his mouth. He turned the car back over, with his hands that are for dexterous manipulation of objects (but not his penis, that’s bad) and he climbed back in through the back windshield because it wasn’t there anymore because of Abraham Lincoln. And also because of the Jews probably, but the TV hadn’t told him that yet, so it might not be true until Tuesday.

    Space Shuttle Girl cried when Otto told her he died and landed on the grass, which was green. And also not on fire like the blue car. “Otto,” she said. “I am a simple space shuttle girl who only knows how to be from outer space and how to raise a little girl we get to name after the mail is forwarded from my uterus. And also I have a Juris Doctorate.”

    “From outer space!” Otto added enthusiastically, with a blue car.

    “My only hope now is to sell ideas to people who only have beliefs. And I will have to have a blue car also to get to places to transact this businessing. And then or Belinda by then Lillian after before now will have to become rich with her answering prowess, earning at least fourteen or fifteen dollars. No higher than that though, because of Abraham Lincoln.”

    “I can give you my blue car!” Otto said enthusiastically, with a blue car still for now until then. “Also,” he said, “I want Belinda to have my fancy shoes.”

    “I’d rather them for Lillian,” Space Shuttle Girl said, “so that I will be crying less. And also will have sold some ideas so we can have cupcakes.”

    “I feel.”

    “Yes. People do that. And also they call them things. Sometimes it overlaps, mostly it doesn’t. Probably because of Abraham Lincoln. He loved tall hats.”

    “I read that in a movie once,” said Otto. “He was also an avid beardist and inventor of basketball. Because of his tall hat and also his tall body, that was shot near its top with a bullet I heard in that book I saw in the window.”

    “Yes. Also.”

    “I am a very unhappy person after I am dead,” mused Otto. “I don’t think I like it. If I shake the Scrabble board, I might be able to be before after I am dead and resee if I am not unhappy as I am after it. I enjoyed football and riding my bike growing up, though I could not feel mitosis, so it may have been painful in miniature or else like a massage, but without the structure . . . I will throw out the literary critiques and cram all the math back in and I will not mix long division and the Civil War because of my bitchin’ blue car. Also the atriums. But I think we may be safe with the ventricles. Also, I didn’t like that one book written by the guy with the arcane vocabulary and also masking simplicity in a series of phonetic noises where no one knows about cosmology. But I understand that I had played basketball with only three people when we did it in the schoolyard where the sun was in the middle of the ceiling, though not exactly of course. We hurled the basketball at the basketball hoop in attempts both vain and successful at field goals, worth one point less than in the football we didn’t play in the schoolyard because of no uprights. And also no kickers really and Mississippi and cutting the ribbon because of not eleven guys and the guy near the schoolyard had a rake he threw at the mice, but also sometimes at the gridironers and baseballers or even the kids throwing dog shit at each other because it is funny if it’s not happening to you when it happens to someone and they don’t make you smell them because you are dead because your car has no doors so you can’t get out and you hope it explodes because of Abraham Lincoln. So I have an idea.”

    “How much does it cost?”

    “Dollars and dollars,” Otto said. “But we can also have cupcakes for days.”

    “Belinda can stop making money after twelve dollars. Huzzah!” Space Shuttle Girl jumped twelve feet in the air and a dollar fell from her semi-fancy shoes each foot she climbed under her feet in the shoes that were not as fancy as Otto’s, but only because of her clothes that didn’t look stupid. The dollars wafted down to the ground and wondered why the fuck you were still reading this. Holy shit!

    Otto ran away, careful not to scuff his fancy shoes.

    Lillian skipped home from school, unadopted one day more through sheer wiliness and a deftness at quoting case law. But not in verse, because that could cause an explosion. She hurdled the cars that weren’t blue and lunged over the pavement, leaping as a turtle might. With a paint marker, she added Esperanto translations to street signs, and so her commute was lengthy. She was four feet and several inches as well and she wore clothes that were not stupid, but the way in which they lacked stupidity was divergent from her parents both as blue cars and silver cars. And also red cars and gold cars and black cars and white cars. But not green cars. Or Cadillacs. Unless they are convertibles. But also she had four dollars, and this made her nervous. But not so nervous as quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes in verse. But she also didn’t know who Oliver Wendell Holmes was, so she never spoke in verse because she assumed he must have said “may I have a banana split” at some point. And also other mundane things like “I hate The Scarlet Letter, that book sucks and is boring also”.

    Belillian von Scooter Ottoshuttle hated her name, though she loved her parents. And not just because their clothes were largely not stupid, as were her own, just in a different way that has something to do with cars and why the fuck are you still reading this?

    A very loud noise hurt Lillian’s ears and when she got home she saw that a space shuttle was landed in front of her house, which was also where her parents both lived and also kept their clothes that weren’t stupid and their shoes that were fancy and partly fancy. She looked in shock, and also she was stunned and unsure of how to react, as her father drop kicked out of the front door and did nine somersaults to the curb and announced, “I traded in my blue car for a space shuttle so your mother can be from outer space again instead of selling ideas that might cause Lincolnian explosions that kill her husband, and also people who don’t have fancy shoes and also who may or may not wear clothes that aren’t not stupid".

    The blue car drove up to the house. Chapwood got out and screamed.

    And also, The End

The Ethical Dilemma of Intentional Chaos

2010-06-05T19:49:00.014-04:00

I’m a moron, and this is my wife. She’s frosting a cake with a paper knife. - Frank Zappa

The Nazi medical experiments – even taking into consideration the lack of scientific rigor – have produced data that researchers have considered valuable, and potentially useful in helping mankind. Creating a good from an evil. There has been much debate about whether or not using the data, even if it helps people, is ethical. Even if we condemn the methods by which the data was gained, using it could potentially be seen by some future comic-book-supervillain-type as license to sacrifice some of his fellow human beings – and even condemn himself to the status of villain by history – in order to fulfill some messianic role he envisions for himself (whether or not a reasonable observer would consider that delusional).

I have an erection. That's a good sign. I'm ready to go to trial. Lock and load. - Denny Crane

Computers and cell phones are an inextricable part of modern life. If you live in the industrialized world, you cannot really get by without at least having some access to these, even if you yourself do not own them. In order to affect, in any way, the world where these items are utilized and, in truth, from which much of the world is controlled, directly or indirectly, you must make use of these items. However, the coltan that is used to produce these items comes to us in essentially the same way blood diamonds (and a good deal of gold) comes to us. Is it ok to use these items, helping to rape and murder fellow human beings in Africa, if somehow the items are part of a push to change the very policies that allow and encourage these behaviors? If that/those goal(s) is/are achieved, will it condone the next comic-book-supervillain-type, before the fact, to “advance” mankind by being monstrous to portions of it?

I don't patronize bunny rabbits. - Veronica's Dad

Colonialism never ended. It went from Britain to America, and is now essentially carried out through the policies of organizations like the WTO and the IMF. These organizations, forged in the hubristic certainty of the ontological truths behind Anglophone philosophical traditions, force these “objective” truths down the throats of a variant world of myriad differing and contingent thought traditions. We’ve gone from Enlightenment thinking to Jamesian Pragmatism to some kind of post-Reagan-Revolution ontological certainty. And we’ve wielded it like a brutal club. America is the Utility Monster.

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a Communist.- Hélder Câmara

Which brings us to charity. How good should a person feel about giving to charity if that excess income is predicated on a predatory system? Even if the individual functioning inside of our industrialized society has earned his salary in an insulated manner, say selling home grown food at a farmer’s market, he still operates inside of a system (and inevitably benefits from it) which has predatory sections. None of these can be fully removed from the whole equation. In addition to the externalizing elements from a national standpoint, there are externalizing elements from a class standpoint. If the purchasing habits of consumers in the country seek out the lowest prices, driving them down through competition, then wages in those industries will be driven down, placing other consumers in a position of having less money to put into the economy. Now the entropy is locked inside our own subsystem. So, the externalization goes from even smaller subsystems inside our subsystem to other smaller subsystems inside our subsystem, and we whittle our way down to an eventual aristocracy. In propping up and even to some extent constructing this situation, even if unintentionally, can we really feel as if we have done something moral by giving charity to the very people we have placed in the position of need that necessitates that charity? If we neither support their wages through a willingness to pay a fair price for a good or through any kind of functional social safety net or equitable tax system, are we not engaging in Munchausen by Proxy when we “help” these people out? And as for charity even remotely replacing social welfare, let me quote the following sentiment which seems far more in line with human behavior than that suggested by “volunteerists”.

I'm not that much of a moralist. If I were I would be donating my salary then to school teachers. I admit that. If the man came to me and said, "well, we're gonna levy a tax and we're gonna raise school teachers salaries to $750 a week," I would approve of it and pay the tax like that. - Lenny Bruce

[Dash Dash Dash]

“The Market” is functionally illiterate. - Major General Mortimer Swarthington III *

Unfortunately, you might need to learn Mandarin soon. We ignore the subjective, contingent, era-specific nature of our social and economic behaviors. And China experiments: taking the segments of our thought that they find to have efficacy and discarding the rest, and interweaving their own thoughts. Whatever one would like to say about the human rights violations of China (and rightfully so), we cannot ignore the question of efficacy here. By backing away from stringent ideology, the Chinese have made leaps and bounds. Even if we bracket out the ethical questions, still, instead of seeing this for the success of pragmatism and experimentation it is, we take it as vindication of our superior knowledge of objective truths because China has moved somewhat in our direction.

The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. - Albert Einstein

We have mingled ethics and economics and hammered them together where they did not wish to join. This is particularly problematic in libertarian thinking, where a stringently means-based ethics has been applied to the inherently ends-based study of economics. By manipulating the inevitably induction-derived axioms upon which their philosophy is derived, they write into its origins the ends which they already seek, and they do it through strict accordance with deductive logic. Thusly, they dupe themselves into false beliefs, but false beliefs that are comforting in that their parts fit nicely together. The idea that human thought and understanding might be inelegant cannot be considered, tolerated, or condoned. So, they massage reality in a way that will not take. Their words may follow one to the next, but they cannot separate the origins of their thought from the epistemic approaches they oppose. And this is why a libertarian can say something so naive and schizophrenic as he is against imperialism and for unfettered markets. The latter leads to the former. The former is often used to enforce the latter. Of course, it is at this point that things devolve into logomachy and a series of No True Scotsman arguments.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes. - Obi-Wan Kenobi

Back to efficacy, the viability of the “free market” – to whatever degree it actually has functioned and benefitted us – has always been contingent on palming off the harmful by-products of its implementation. Free markets work inside a subsystem that is able to dump its entropy into another subsystem. Free white men in early America dumped their entropy on slaves and the indigenous populations. After the Reconstruction, it was dumped on the poor and immigrants. Then it was dumped on what are essentially our new stand-ins for slaves, cheap labor in the third world, through globalization. And now we have nowhere left for it to go but to come back to rest on the middle class here in America (and really the first world). Bad news.

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes. - Aristotle

We’ve worshiped perversions of the concept of freedom for decades (really centuries) to the detriment of democracy. And a liberal democracy (a democracy constrained by a constitution) is the only form of practicable freedom we have thus far formulated in this world. And we spit on it in the name of false liberty over and over again as our world slips into a feudal structure and we scream in the name of “slavery is freedom” that the opposing viewpoints are just that. Accusing the other side of what we ourselves are doing. Unable to separate Orwell’s warnings from the specific philosophy utilized for illustration in his books, we forget that Orwell was himself a socialist. Just one willing to criticize the excesses and problems of his own field of thought.

Can I confess something? I tell you this as an artist, I think you'll understand. Sometimes when I'm driving... on the road at night... I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The... flames rising out of the flowing gasoline. - Christopher Walken

So, the question is, is it ok to keep throwing our hands up in the air saying it’s no one’s fault how the world is because not having any sense of (conscious) economic hierarchy at all is ingrained in our heads as morally superior, even in light of its implementation being plainly destructive and poisonous to human freedom and dignity? The fact is that where we build no hierarchy, one will be built by whatever forces are allowed to. We abdicate our democratic right to self-determination, and therefore we abdicate our right to the only practicable form of freedom. And so our chocolate, our coffee, our sneakers, all kinds of products come to us in ways we have to seek out to learn. And when we do, most of us don’t like it. But we let it go that way and then “vote” with our meager wallets. Why do we allow the behavior to crop up in the first place? Because we allow things to work out with minimal interference. And this is what we get. This is not freedom.

"Baby! Up your butt with a coconut!" I think he was prepared to do it! Except I saw no coconut. He, uh, he had no coconut to my knowledge. - Grimm (Quick Change)

China’s going to take over eventually because it is unlikely we will make the adaptive changes necessary to remain relevant (well, at least as relevant) in the world. And they will not make things better, only move us forward again (unless, as is always possible, we are headed for the last stop for mankind). The irony that a type of global-scale nation-based Social Darwinism will likely destroy the lingering, perverted vestiges of the more classically understood concept of Social Darwinism would be delicious if it weren’t galactically tragic.

Pride comes before a fall. Holy Hell, does it!

Who knows what will happen? We look at the past, the present, and we conjecture. Who knows?

The choice is for us to say
Completely change or fade away. - Blues Traveller

* Ok, I made that one up.

Made For (Cable) TV Movies

2010-05-18T13:03:00.002-04:00

Here's a list of ideas for movies I'm going to pitch to cable TV.

Wild Turkeys Fly South
The Canadian Nickel
Broken Rickshaws
Do They Make Donuts in Vermont?
The Toilet Bible
Destiny Kills My Dog
Cookies for Cameron
Only Heroes Bake Pies
The Reading Lamp
Earthquake at the North Pole
The Baby That Fell from the Sky
Peas, Carrots, and Deception
God Helps Those Who Fill out the Proper Paperwork
The Flat Tire
Hello, My Name is Love
The Sofa Miracle
Rumple Phil Quinn
Grandma's Hat
The Gift Pelican
Hurricane Dad
The Ice-Creamist
Vow of the Shoemaker
A Jaywalking in a Small Town
Governor Mom
Mail Order Kismet
Jackie Collins Presents: Finnegans Wake

So, who's gonna hook me up with an executive so we can get these brilliant movies into production?

I Believe in Unicorns

2010-05-13T12:58:00.004-04:00

With great power comes great responsibility - Ben Parker

Unicorns!

They’re dangerous. They carry disease and they hold anti-American values, like joules, and I read on the internet that they’re planning to overthrow the government and impose pagan law. This threat must be stopped no matter if it costs trillions of dollars.

Freedom of speech is a right. Rights exist in relation to duties. Your right to the fruits of your labor imposes upon me a duty not to steal from you. Your right to live means I have a duty not to kill you. Your right to privacy means that the government has a duty not to spy on you. These rights tell other people they cannot do certain things. They dictate behavior. (Sorry, but they do.)

But your right to free speech is a little different. It merely requires that you are allowed to believe what you choose to and that you can express those beliefs without the government interfering. The duty it imposes is on the government not to stop you, not to incarcerate you. That is all. There is no obligation to treat it as important, correct, or anything but the crazed utterances of a free individual. Neither the government nor I (really no one) has the responsibility to accept your beliefs, nurture them, or even not to laugh at them. This is different than the rights mentioned above. I have to respect your right to your possessions and not interfere. I do not have to respect your beliefs and can interfere by arguing with you. I am under no obligation to leave you alone to believe what you believe. I can try to change your mind. In fact, I'd say I have the duty where the truth is being denied or ignored. I’m not sure people really feel that under the surface, however.

I would like to suggest that each of us has a duty to freedom and posterity to not be actively full of shit. All the Howard W. Campbell, Jr.s out there create a snowball effect over time, and cumulatively threaten freedom and democracy. Reality doesn’t care about our fever dreams. If, for example, global warming is as grave a threat as some of the more severe predictions (becoming more and more mainstream), then compiling a narrative to the contrary creates a situation where the harsh physical realities to come will very likely dissolve any concept of freedom or democracy. Raw power will become the instrument of resource disbursement, and therefore the primary (if not sole) determiner of survival. The more likely scenario, however, is that other places more engaged with this reality will leave us behind economically as the global economy adjusts to these changes and we cling with religious fervor to behaviors that will no longer garner us even a tiny share of the world’s wealth. And there is also the possibility that groups from the parts of the world where the effects of global warming are most severe today will enact violence against the Unites States in retaliation. These subservient and/or defensive positions can only strain the ability of our government to concern itself with the rights of its people . . . which is its primary purpose for existence.

In short, the abuse of free speech will ultimately lead to its loss. Humans, first and foremost, are survivors. If that survival requires acquiescence to a powerful autocracy or oligarchy and the surrender of rights, it will happen. “Give me liberty or give me death” is the pampered tough guy talk of someone who has never feared starvation, in the face of mere meddling with local affairs. Starving people want food, not the right to vote.

What’s abuse of free speech? I’m a free speech absolutist. I even defend Fred Phelps right to be the biggest douche bag on Earth. Abuse is knowingly fostering plainly false information. Obviously, this is tricky, since the entire point of free speech is to take into account the limitations of human knowledge, particularly a given individual’s. And I suggest no action taken to prevent it other than more speech. Appeal to people. My point is that if you put forward the notion that unicorns are a threat, and that becomes a widely held “truth”, then the behaviors of society, its citizens, and its government will be to take actions requisite to the deadly unicorn threat. If we proactively divorce ourselves from reality, reality will kick our fuckin’ asses when we’re looking the other way – you know, at the unicorns.

So, I suggest that each of us has a duty to at the very least believe what we spew out into the world. Words do have power. Otherwise advertising and propaganda (is there a difference?) would have no effect on us. I’d suggest (but do not expect) that people take upon themselves a duty to vet their information and beliefs constantly. In all the often empty rhetoric about individual responsibility, let me suggest that this also goes to how we use our freedom of speech. If enough of us abuse it enough of the time, we’ll be a nation of dullards ill-equipped to take on reality and ripe for take over and domination.

Free speech + intellectual indolence = disaster

Oh fuck! Unicorn.

DUCK!

Walla Walla Bing Bang

2010-05-05T21:49:00.002-04:00

One morning, I sank my breakfast and from spear arose it on verse, 'flow in the murmurs and revivify the waste'. I punched it in the metaphor and lapped it greedily. - Profundecles

Pala retond quella loto meitzglude flonted chone sup. Ruhantly flisogroup per doouthis portra pilt. Flagrem potulent dor euphonic chocolate. Alabaster chicken wire, joven wiltring mein dysphasic contreenation ghophald propter hoc dovus virulence candy wan. Obviatedly, torcent kreptchen hula hoop bonus grint.

C’est la vie.

Give Me A Job

2010-04-26T22:58:00.003-04:00

Please see my resume below. Thank you.

William A Jackson
25 Main St., Lemonburg, NJ 01234
201-555-PUNK Email: waj@williamist.pez

OBJECT:           Calamitician

SUMMARY:      f(S’/s)S ≅S (+) s prophetic years monkeying around with calamity and calamity-related industries, both in and around – often through – the bounds of the “law”.

SKILLS:

Salutary:             Structured diffusive adhesive lunaticking and sundry superfluous opulence unreconstructionism for Fortune 500 Company.

Training:             Authored manual for buttress preponderance at start-up sommelier academy in Hoboken, NJ.

Supervisory:       Supervised casting couch activities for non-fraternity, non-union customer contact whipping boy falsehood mouthpiece. Maintained strict metrics for developing faux-incompetence POC employees vis-a-vis piss = rain. Assured full and thorough compliance with local and federal sexual harassment law at all levels of development and service.

Pugilism:            Was responsible for punching rogue personalities in the throat to maintain required 350% efficiency levels during peak hours of midnight to midnight Monday through the following Thursday of each week.

Hole Filler:       All needs met for all jobs utilizing natural and developed skills in fantasticism and amazitude.

CHARITY:       I maintain a Harry Potter blog for people suffering from Alpha Lipoic Acid Deficiency

EXPERIENCE:   LI’L PORK CHOP DOODADS, Happyville, PA
                                  Purveyor of Thrift Americana Imports
                                  Williamist Cum Laude

                                  WE LOVE YOU, INC, Alligator Rape, FL
                                  Flag Manufacturer
                                  Troop Supportist (Passive, non-hazardous division)

EDUCATION:   University of America
                                  School of Relative Hard Knocks, Scarsdale Campus

HOBBIES:           Fungo like a motherfucker.

Train

2010-04-19T14:22:00.002-04:00

    Bertrand was running late for the train again. He pushed back his hair instinctively when the wind blew it forward and onto his brow. His hair blew forward immediately after he removed his hand. The inexcusable resultant confusion caused Bertrand to stumble, tuck-and-rolling and then springing straight up, nearly reverberating like a tuning fork. The train’s wake sucked him forward and he flopped straight onto his face, his instincts incomprehensibly sending his hands into his pockets.

    Blood gushed from his nose.

    Izzy watched the stock character pratfall on the platform and admonished herself for chuckling silently. The man really did appear hurt. The young boy behind her refused to kick the back of her chair or creep his head around the side of her chair. Izzy turned her attention to the passing scenery outside of her window, changing from the cloistered thicket of towers and other icons of urban density to the increasing green of undeveloped land. The boy persisted in his refusal to behave like a trope.

    It was beginning to irk her.

    Bertrand continued chasing the train. He held a handkerchief – which was slowly changing from white to red – to his face. He artfully dodged low-hanging tree branches and rocks and downed branches as he scurried through the thickening greenery. “If only I hadn’t worn loafers today,” he thought to himself. Annoyed, he decided to run along the tracks instead, though he had to alter his gait to comply with the spacing of the ties.

    “Oh, Goebbels fuck a horse,” Bertrand shouted. A buck stood on the tracks, staring directly at him, motionless. Not entirely prepared for the obstruction, Bertrand leaped awkwardly. Though he cleared the deer, the tongue of his right loafer caught on the buck’s antlers and he lost a shoe. He continued limping at high speed, receiving splinters in his exposed foot from the ties.

    He was beginning to lose his cool.

    Izzy considered giving the boy a raspberry in hopes of coaxing comforting behavior from him. But she thought better when she recalled her last attempt at a raspberry. She had split her lip and couldn’t taste sweetness for six months. It was an injury she was unwilling to risk again, even if the boy was being intolerably unobtrusive.

    Bertrand dove, head first, through the boy’s window, broken glass flying in three directions. When she was pelted in the base of the skull with the beaded safety glass, Izzy smiled. The boy was acting up. The world was not off-kilter.

    Bertrand hopped towards the food car, holding his splinter-riddled foot in the air. The handkerchief now hung out of his breast pocket, completely red and crusty now. The boy stood calmly. He sidled out of his seat and headed towards the bathroom.

    A voice came over the address system through horrendous static. “Next stp, Lglnsk Prkw fricrwk.”

    The train stopped and no one got off. After three minutes, the address system came on again, clearer this time. “Get the fuck out!”

Rape Is Not Cool Redux

2010-04-15T11:43:00.000-04:00

So, I need to post something I guess. This is inspired by an episode of NewsRadio (one of the funniest shows of all time). I translated Rape Is Not Cool into Russian and then back into English using Babel Fish.

I exactly of can' t believes that all people of things they speak… controversy. - Prince

[O]' Kay, I do not love to have a talk policy, but I feel that I must arrive outside and say that I against the rape. I know I it risks much in way to say outside here, but for people it is necessary to know that the rape of [plokh].

Now, those me outside. I there is no radical extremist or that -[nibyd]. I achieve that rape it is not mentioned in the constitution. In actuality, even it is not mentioned in 10 commandments. And I not [govoryashch] we must turn society upward by feet, its [vykorchevyvayushch] from all traditions. But completely no reason we can encourage the decrease of rape through the private action. We must also prescribe strict anti- force laws at position level, even if the more lax legislation of rape in other positions causes to us the outcome of the population and matter. This is moral imperative, and we must prepare it independent of consequences.

Furthermore, I believe that we it can compensate this by way to propose negative tax rate to the matters and to observe by holiness of the freedom of agreement. Exactly in proportion to Robert Nozick it stated that truly free society it allowed persona to sell into slavery, truly free society must allow persona to sell her (or him… prevent us not to have any accusations of [seksizma], you, because I not person, who relates to the women… as it disdainfully proves to my to write it) right to by [polnostyu] solid to sovereignty. We therefor cannot mix in the cases, where the worker of consensually entered contract. To make otherwise Stalinism.

We, however, should hold the balance between by competing the absolute categorically imperatives. Robust savings of [sushchestvena] to the welfare of the citizens of large city in the history of humanity, with the large of the [franshizoy] of sports in the history of humanity, in the large position in the history of humanity, in the large country in the history of humanity, from bitchingest by god in the history of humanity. Some people of most exceptional freedomness and libertotality of amassed the disproportionately high portions ~~of the capita~~l of freedom for itself through the there main use of liberty (by [zaveshchannoy] by it their libertastic by ancestors) and understanding of the market ~~for gamesmanship of confidence~~. Their example shines as the lighthouse of light and the drizzle of the cascades monetary, creating works for more than libertarded of people of mud which they must nevertheless give their children; however, their chances to freedomtastic of liberlife is small. Without these the fantastic liberty -royals of superpatriot, would be there any savings and people of mud exist without their aid ~~of interaction~~. For this reason, we must balance the needs of children against the needs to force and to allow that if these patriots ~~of the parasites~~ of the super- imposing of freedomliscious of the liberty of super- [osuzheny] of rape, then they pay IT sculptural penalty $200.000 instead of the prison sentence. Penalties will go into the fund for the initiatives of the faith, where anti- confidently rape formation it will strengthen.

If you please help to obtain word outside about the rape. Give formation and you will have a talk to your friends and family. Together we can libertarily freedom shit from the rape and wish it away with the utopian ethics.

You to your period.

Send by me money.

Pie Fights Are Hilarious!

2010-04-09T16:11:00.006-04:00

Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind. - E. B. White

I have never laughed at a pie fight. But they are, in theory, hilarious. It is a ridiculous behavior. The problem is that it had become old hat long before most of us were born. It is seen therefor as something that does in fact happen, if only (or primarily) in fiction. An element of comedy is the unexpected. Pie fights do not have this element. But the first pie fight did. And arguably, the first pie fight each of us saw did as well. However, we were likely exposed to this first pie fight when we were too young to recognize the absurdity of the act, and it therefor went into our experience as one more thing that happens. Even if we are unable to see it as behavior that makes any sense.

Things that are at first unexpected, become expected after they have been experienced. Particularly after they have been experienced over and over again, as seeing a pie fight has been by most people. We look back at what previous generations thought was funny, and sometimes we ourselves laugh, but probably when we see something either unique or which never really entered the public sphere in a general enough way as to become 'one more thing that happens' to us. Even where we do not have a visceral reaction and laugh spontaneously, we often have an appreciation of the artifice of the comedy we are viewing and perhaps see it with a respect, but also detachment; like this absurdly dry dissection of pie fights.

In other words, everything we think of as being of the group of things we consider the funniest we’ve encountered in our life of experience is becoming less funny as time goes on. Only in not catching on in its own time can something remain funny in the visceral sense to moderately educated and experienced people in a society at a later time. And then, not as much to any small group that had enjoyed the work in its own time or the intervening time between then and the time when the work became appreciated on a fuller scale.

Monty Python is less funny every day. So is George Carlin, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Big Lebowski, Richard Pryor, Airplane!, Lenny Bruce, Abbott & Costello, etc. Once the ways in which these things communicate to us becomes well-trodden, they seem just like another way people communicate ideas and are no longer viscerally funny, even if we can appreciate the craft, cleverness, and even brilliance evident in them.

This is kind of awesome in a way. Comedy is often a way of expressing frustrations. As particular examples of comedy become accepted by large groups, those frustrations are being addressed. So, we get to keep upping the ante. We have to keep trying to look for ways to make things funny, express remaining frustration. I suppose over the years, with more and more recorded instances of comedy in books, plays, movies, television, DVDs, and comedy albums, we will also always have a new place to explore and keep our wits sharpened and engaged even when we are not expanding the parameters of comedy. (Though, someone somewhere is always expanding the parameters. It's a matter of finding and/or recognizing instances.) And maybe there will be (or what the Hell do I know, I'm sure there have been) periodic revivals of dormant communicative methods of comedy. And certain things, like wordplay, are evergreen. Though the specific executions required to exact a response seems contingent in the way the rest of this post describes.

I have no idea what I’m talking about. My reading and viewing are limited. Everyone’s is to one extent or another. Sometimes something is viscerally hilarious centuries later, like A Modest Proposal, which to me feels like it could be a piece on The Daily Show today. Obviously it’s a well-known piece, but I guess it is mainly within certain circles. Maybe with the level or type of satire currently popular, it will get defanged soon enough.

In any case, hey, don’t fear dementia in old age. Pie fights will be fucking hilarious again!

Also, sodomy.

Worst Principles

2010-03-26T18:29:00.009-04:00

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. The Declaration of Independence

Libertarians believe in the American heritage of liberty, enterprise, and personal responsibility. Libertarians recognize the responsibility we all share to preserve this precious heritage for our children and grandchildren. - Libertarian Party

Since governments, when instituted, must not violate individual rights, we oppose all interference by government in the areas of voluntary and contractual relations among individuals. People should not be forced to sacrifice their lives and property for the benefit of others. They should be left free by government to deal with one another as free traders; and the resultant economic system, the only one compatible with the protection of individual rights, is the free market. - Libertarian Party

Article I Section 8 (U. S. Constitution)

The Congress shall have power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

[. . .]

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; (Note: And even where one might invoke the Tenth Amendment, individual states have broader authority to regulate industry.)

Someone bring back Peirce and James and Dewey. Please!

Let me start off by saying that there may be a legitimate Constitutional argument against the mandate in the health care bill that recently passed. (Although the ability of states to opt out of the mandate undercuts this somewhat.) But let’s get serious. The Constitution is not the root of opposition to the law. The opposition is philosophical. More importantly, it is a philosophy allowed by the Constitution, but not endorsed by it. The word “Constitution” is meant to give more weight to an argument with weak – or at least highly challengeable – practical substance.

Now, let's deal with the fact that the often (though not always) put forth idea by Libertarians is that the Founding Fathers were Libertarians, the Constitution is a Libertarian document, and they are the protectors of our Founding Principles is factually insupportable and utter horseshit. You want to be a Libertarian, be my guest. All the cool kids are doing it. But why don’t you go ahead and apply the non-aggression principle to your abuse of language and history and stop trying to cram Libertarianism down people’s throats by claiming that A) the Constitution backs you and B) that apparently the Constitution isn’t so much a document that defines and restricts government power so much as an authoritarian document that, through the tyranny of the law of dead generations, prevents us from exercising self-determination. Because, frankly, that is what you’re doing when you make that argument. The Constitution is an often vague framework that sets up the institutions of government and their methods of dealing with each other and the public, along with a list of particular reserved rights (with the right to expand that definition reserved in the 9th Amendment) that are not to be legislated against, though it may be the will of the majority.

When this authoritarian, and make no mistake imaginary, Constitution is invoked against the self-determination of what Jefferson called “the living generation”, it undercuts its authority (the Consent of the Governed) and begins to destroy itself.

When, as more than a few Libertarians still do, one asserts that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is unconstitutional, they do not injure the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the mind of their listener, but they injure the Constitution. Now, the Constitution is a mighty thing. This comparison only inflicts a mere chip. But over and over again, chip chip chip, the Constitution is destroyed by those seeking to convert it to their own political ideology. Engaging in Orwellian word-power games makes their claims of being defenders of liberty ludicrous at best. I, and most others, reject the tailored definitions of freedom and liberty of such people. They are pernicious equivocations.

Recognize the right of people to choose not to live in a Libertarian society. Every time you invoke the authoritarian pseudo-Constitution, invoke discrimination as fundamental to liberty, you do harm to both. If you do ultimate harm to the Constitution, society could become untethered to any semblance of stability, balance, and perennial civil rights. People live in the real world. Theories can go fuck themselves when they refuse to function in the real world.

Parodox, meet simple-minded absolutism.

I'll be back later to clean up the brain chips.

Skeleton Key

2010-03-19T20:56:00.003-04:00

Holy Moley Crackerjack Aces!

If I may be indulged a blatant equivocation in the name of inquiry: if there is no truth with a capital 'T', then the truth is constructed - either individually or through a dialogue in the public sphere - and an appropriate aggregate measure of truth in any given circumstance in fact gives us a truth percentage or truth probability. These are nominally the same, as can be demonstrated by my saying so.

This allows us a mutual self-dominion of divine proportions not limited to art. Disallowing nonsensical mysticism and transcendental horseshittery, we can still dialogue perception. So, Santa Claus exists. We merely need let him. As well, not only was JFK assassinated by the Mafia and Castro and Oswald, but also Zeta Reticuli, the Hamburgler, and Jack the Ripper. 9/11 was both an inside job and an act of terrorism exactly as observed and reported. Building 7 was simultaneously pulled and grapevine-fumbled temporally. FDR knew about Pearl Harbor and let it happen so he could trick Einstein into helping develop an atom bomb because at "Naked World Domination Pokeno" he had bet Churchill he could do it. Of course, unknown to Roosevelt, he had only done this because the alien Confederate partisans who had injected him with polio piggybacked a hiccup trigger. Crack was invented by Ronald Reagan and Star Wars is a true story.

I'm a millionaire. You will all send me money for my services in regards to truth make-telling and millionairing while I logomorph non-linear wealth actualization with adequately confused rhetoric.

You love this. You believe this. All things are the result of conscious efforts by sentient beings and can therefor be controlled, if not necessarily by you. But through mutually dialoguing into truth those things we cannot thus far control, we can steady the boat of our confusion and construct the further threads of our otherwise inevitable undoing.

We are immortal!

I'm relying on all of you to endow me with the ability to fly. Don't fuck it up.

Send me money.

Space Kicks Ass

2010-03-10T16:14:00.004-05:00

Ok, this is some lazy-ass shit. But I haven't posted in a while. Enjoy. (Or not.)

    Magnifico Flores stood on the bridge of Lucy’s Nose, waiting for thematic resurgence. The waves lapped at the exposed hull, portending mutations if the doctor were to be unsuccessful in his research. Communications channels open, Captain Flores addressed his adversary.

    “With all due respect, you honor,” Magnifico said, “you used loaded dice. I demand the immediate return of Crewman Cubby’s Pee Wee Reese baseball card.”

    A serpentine voice answered. “The noted Captain Flores. We have heard much of the adventures of you and your fellow humans. We are unimpressed with your ‘love’, ‘sacrifice’, and ‘fair play’. You are visitors here and must abide by our custom. The baseball card was acquired properly under the interstellar laws governing this sector. There are no backsies. Your Crewman Cubby is nothing more than a crybaby.”

    “He’s eleven.”

    “I know not what human age has to do with the softness and guilelessness of your subordinates,” the Lizard Ambassador said.

    Magnifico pressed the mute button on the communications panel and turned to Lieutenant Frogsworth. “Ready the phallicanons, sporto.” The officer unzipped his pants and left the bridge.

    Magnifico pressed the mute button again. “Ambassador Sssssssszzz blah blah, your attitude in ungracious at best. It is outright illegal at worst. My reading of The Zzxxykkyysstttss Contracto Grando Pip Pip Treaty indicates that you must show a good-faith belief of commonence ergo groundicon with regard to Crewman Cubby’s relative maturity on the Zzxxykkyysstttss Cowboy Scale. It is obvious that Crewman Cubby does not meet this criterion.”

    “So?”

    “So?” Magnifico paced the bridge of Lucy’s Nose in agitation. “I will fuck your shit up, dinoboy!”

    “Ah,” the Lizard Man said, “this is that ‘love’ power I’ve heard about from the Milpron Trangigouts.”

    “Something like that,” Magnifico said. “Bend over.” He hit a switch on the communications panel. “Froggy!”

    “Yes Captain,” came Lieutenant Frogsworth’s voice.

    “Fire the phallicanons!”

    White hot plasma fired from Lucy’s undercarriage, destroying the Lizard ship. An external arm on the side of Lucy’s Nose grabbed the baseball card and some surrounding debris, floating free in space, and pulled it inside the ship. Captain Flores woke Crewman Cubby up from his nap and accompanied him to the hangar where the card had been pulled in. Cubby ran over to the pile of debris, lifted Ambassador Sssssssszzz’s decapitated head off of the card, wiped the blood off the card on his shirt and then threw the head into the soup pot that was kept nearby for just such an occurrence. “Thank you, Magnifico,” Crewman Cubby said.

    “You’re welcome, Crewman Cubby,” Magnifico said. “But please, no more playing the ponies.”

    “You betcha,” Crewman Cubby said. “Gambling’s bad. I know that now.”

Due Process

2010-02-26T11:48:00.003-05:00

When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. - Michel Foucalt

    Chapwood skated out onto the ice and was immediately cross-checked, his non-existent hat flying from his crown. He flanked netwest and ricocheted orbitally, resolving a deflectory whack-a-pack.

    Groaning in chapworthical froth, he chip chapped choppy chap. Chip charry chica chica cha charoomby. Cho chicken cello chimes; challenge!

    Slide slide slide, valveless reverberance pierced the chapness of the hypothermic moistings. Twenty twenty forth pushed nine. Chapwood, one-eyed temporarily from hemo-mucilaged lids, off-kilter, on meds – or sufficiently facsimilic as to be indissimilar as infinite divisions of aught – felt his chapness jerked forth towards mad accusatory pantomimes. The dandiful lawkeeper of severity, compensatory in his carriage and manner, growled semantic rape-logics and frowned demagogically to compound the rigging, yet declare fairness of straitjacketing theater.

    Habeas Sentiens, ill-autonomous behaviors vilified through laureate codifications of nonsenses arbitrary as others, chosen, picked, decided of substance in fear of fluid perceptions, reality – real or not – be damned itself in the face of all-powerful “thought”. Narcissism! “Heretic,” they reply. Beaten and fondled, mixed, matched, shocked, inculcated, thrown, denied, given, spun, coddled, agitated and confused.

    Wait, what was the point again? Not to ask. Functions, madness.

    Chapwood pop-and-locked for the justice, fakired and rhetoricked, rote and Pavloved, ogled and had a beer.

    Twelve dollar fine. Scrubbed and released. Warned of probation. No hockey for six weeks.

    Creeping, Chapwood smiled. Out on the sidewalk he skated, rubber-soled shoes on concrete, gliding in grace. The officers chewed on their faces and prayed to their 401(k)s.

A Poem, by Henry . . . by William Jackson

2010-02-18T10:49:00.003-05:00

Here comes Super Wonder Boy
Happy action figure toy
Mommy mommy go to store
If you don't, my life's a bore
Shut your mouth, you precious brat
On the phone, play with the cat
He did what? we'll take her out
He said what? We'll stomp and shout
I broke the cat
Why'd you do that?
No more money for the toy
No more Super Wonder Boy

It's "Lose", God Damn It! (Except When It's "Loose")

2010-02-14T23:53:00.000-05:00

This one's a big friggin' disease, especially online. Lose and Loose. I know people get mixed up with Lie and Lay or Sit and Set or Good and Well or Your and You're or To Two and Too or Their There and They're, but this particular one is really annoying because it's specifically about spelling. People actually know the difference between Lose and Loose . . . when they hear it spoken. In print, people turn moron. They are not homophones and they do not mean similar things. Loose is pronounced like the first syllable of Lucy and means not restrained or contained, or to release from restraint or containment. You know, like in the phrase 'loose change'. Lose is pronounced looz and means to misplace or stop having control of some kind or be defeated in a contest.

Really and truly, it's not a grammar Nazi thing. People know the difference. They just apparently can't spell second grade vocabulary words. Calling someone a "Looser" is basically an accusation that they open the cages at the zoo or some shit.

Be am is are was were being been do does did has have had can could will would should may must might. Suck it!

Captain Cut Corners Meets Mr. Stumble Drunk

2010-02-09T09:23:00.000-05:00

    I almost decided to piss the bed this morning. My stomach felt horrible and I knew any agitation would cause me to vomit. Eventually, I decided to get up. Thick yellow liquid exploded from my gut, followed by a half dozen or so dry heaves. I should have just pissed the bed. I hate throwing up.

    Kneeling in front of the bowl, spent for the moment, I missed the handle twice before successfully flushing. And I thought about the docks. It was weird.

    I used to go fishing with Ken and Wonderbread and Berto all the time. I haven’t been fishing in probably fifteen years.

    I was cutting up blood worms on the dock railing when I heard Berto laughing his ass off. I look to see he’s trying to hook a jellyfish right up against the dock. I should have known something was screwy with him at the time. He was way too amused. Well, that is to say if I observed that today I should have known something was screwy. Then, however, we were kids.

    Me, Berto, and Wonderbread were out with a couple of the Less Than Upstanding kids we knew in high school. Don’t get me wrong. Nice guys. You could just end the night talking with cops when you hung out with them. We were up at 7 Eleven around 1:00 AM for some reason I can’t for the life of me recall. There is a gas station right next to the 7 Eleven and Berto had decided to, unsolicited, let us all know how cool the cigarette sign in the front of lot was. He said it every time as if it were new information. I should have known.

    Me and Wonderbread didn’t feel like going in, even though it was pretty cold. I just remember enjoying the crisp air like that sometimes. Plus, Berto seemed like he might do something...off. That much we were able to see at the time, even if we didn’t know where he was headed. But Berto wasn’t the attraction. This car pulled up on the far right of the parking lot, against a fence that separated the store from a home. The man that stepped out of the car had an unjustified arrogance that was more than equal to the attitude with which he had pulled his bottom-feeder luxury car into its space. And this man had no time for bullshit. He had shit to do.

    At 1:00 AM! I might have pondered that a bit, both then and now, if things had played out differently. But they didn’t.

    Leaving his car running and the door unlocked, Captain Cut Corners strode into the store with a gait that seemed to say, “shoulder check me into the fence”. I did consider that for a minute – and I might have done it – if we were not with the group we were.

    While Captain Cut Corners was transacting State business in the 7 Eleven, Mister Stumble Drunk wobbled towards the car from a dark corner where no one had thus far noticed him. What exactly he was thinking, I did not (and do not) know. But any possibility I imagine amuses me. Perhaps he imagined that a (very arrogant) Car Fairy had left him the wonderful gift of DUI. Perhaps he thought the car was a baton in the middle of a relay race and he was the anchor. Perhaps he thought it was his car, and not registering that he had not seen his car, I’m sure, for hours, he merely accepted the space-time inconsistency with the kind of magnificent aplomb that only the truly shit-faced can exhibit. He may have thought it was a gift from God. Or merely a god. Automobilus, the god of motorized vehicles. He may have thought that he was owed the car for some infraction or capacitance of work he had banked with the Universe...or with Captain Cut Corners. Perhaps Captain Cut Corners had wronged Mister Stumble Drunk in some way that would justify a recompense of one low-end luxury automobile, reeking of cigarette ash and designer-imposter cologne. (Not that Mister Stumble Drunk would have felt himself too good for the car. At least not in the state in which we observed him that morning.)

    In any event, we just watched, agape as Mister Stumble Drunk circumnavigated the failings of his cerebellum on the long and treacherous ten feet between his concrete seat and the prize he had spied. It was irresponsible to just stare, but sometimes the conscious brain cannot process the improbable in any meaningful way. Much like the body in a REM cycle, we were in a sort of disbelief paralysis. And really, you don’t interfere when the Universe puts on a one act comedy for you. You just enjoy it.

    (We didn’t really imagine Mister Stumble Drunk could have gotten the car to drive, no less leave the parking lot.)

    We were struck dumb again as he managed to get behind the wheel and put the car into reverse. With the driver’s side door still open, the car began to move backwards. Slowly!? Inconsistently , yes. But with a presence of mind, or maybe calmness – a quietness – that one would not have expected from one so stumble drunk as was Mister Stumble Drunk.

    And then he bumped into the fence, lightly. But Captain Cut Corners had run straight out the door at this point, splashing coffee from the cup in his hand as he ran. (Coffee! It was 1:00 AM!?) I don’t know what he was thinking at the time, carrying the coffee with him because he did have to get rid of it – right against the store’s wall (nice guy he was) – so that he was free to take care of the crime that was in process against him. He did this by ripping Mister Stumble Drunk, quite violently, from the vehicle. Understandable. Mister Stumble Drunk stumbled, drunk, to the pavement. Although he would not have hit the ground without the Captain’s assistance, this was not truly the Captain’s fault. Then the Captain began yelling at Mister Stumble Drunk. Understandable, if not productive. He had to see the state of mind this man was in. Or lack thereof, as the case was.

    And then Captain Cut Corners threw Mister Stumble Drunk against the wall. Me and Wonderbread discontinued being quite as agape as we had been. No one was hurt...yet, but there was a look of almost cosmic confusion on Mister Stumble Drunk’s face. He had just been ripped from a fantasy of Car Fairies and gods of motorized vehicles and fair play in the Universe.

    That’s not to say he wasn’t still quite shit-faced.

    And then Captain Cut Corners threw a haymaker. Mister Stumble Drunk went down without fanfare. Collapsed. As the Captain was getting ready to kick the downed man, Wonderbread was half way to restrain him as I yelled, “Hey, that’s enough man!” Mister Stumble Drunk got a swift kick to the kidney anyway. The Captain got a roundhouse punch to the temple, courtesy of Wonderbread. So, Captain Cut Corners spit in Wonderbread’s face and tried to kick him in the nuts, kneeing the inside of Wonderbread’s thigh instead. At this point, I had gotten around behind him and restrained him. Berto was headed out now due to the commotion and began running towards us.

    Wonderbread leaned down and started to pull off one of the Captain’s shoes. I looked at him a little confused, “what the hell are you doing?”

    “Just hold him for a minute.”

    “Hey, what the hell are you doing? Leave my shoes. I’m gonna kick your fucking...hey!”

    Having removed one shoe, Wonderbread heaved it onto the roof of the 7 Eleven and went to work removing the second shoe. Berto stopped dead in his tracks and started laughing. I began to worry about being there with the Less Than Upstandings. There was no way the cops weren’t going to take the Captain’s side when they showed up. Mister Stumble Drunk, a couple of neighborhood kids, and a couple of Less Than Upstandings versus the Captain. Not looking good. Even if Eddie was the one who took the call.

    Wonderbread got the other shoe to come off, it’s sock involuntarily following. Separating the sock into his left hand, Wonderbread began to beat Captain Cut Corners with the shoe, now in his right hand. The Captain’s state of sobriety mirrored Mister Stumble Drunk’s after only a couple of blows. Split lip, black eye, one sock, and piss dribbling down his leg, the Captain no longer looked so arrogant. But we needed to get the fuck out of there. Me and Berto pulled Wonderbread up saying, “Dude, you’re gonna get arrested. Let’s go!”

    Reluctantly accepting, Wonderbread got up and threw the bloody shoe on the roof next to the other and stuffed the Captain’s sock in his mouth. The we got out of there, double-step. One of the Less Than Upstandings flicked a still-lit cigarette butt onto the Captain, who was now using the sock as a handkerchief to mop of the blood running from his nose and lip. He’d be ok, but the battery was still a bit much. Nevertheless, I started laughing pretty hard about a half block down the road, shortly joined by the others.

    We got off the main road pretty much right after that, just to be safe. We cut through the property of a local junior high school. And that’s where we lost one of the Less Than Upstandings. Shrugging, we hopped the fence at the far end of the school and landed in the cul-de-sac one block over from Berto’s house. We made the rest of the trip through serene blackness, bristling with the possibilities of bad horror scenarios. But this was not that kind of neighborhood. Intermittently laughing the rest of the way, we didn’t say much. After the rush wore off and the reality of the late hour kicked in, we were pretty well spent for the night.

    Just as we were walking into Berto’s driveway, Wonderbread spotted the missing Less Than Upstanding and pointed him out. We all turned to see him running, somewhat bow-legged, with a large piece of wood balanced awkwardly above his head.

    It was the cigarette sign from the gas station. He had stolen it as a gift for Berto. The laughing resumed.

Free Will is Unconstitutional

2010-02-03T12:07:00.007-05:00

The Founding Fathers were Enlightenment Thinkers.
Enlightenment Thinkers were highly influenced by Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
Newtonian Physics implies Determinism
Philosophical Libertarianism relies on the hope/belief that a Materialistic view of the world is overreaching and/or incorrect.
Quantum Uncertainty, initially formulated by Werner Heisenberg, is the best scientific challenge to a purely Materialistic universe, and is therefor the best scientific challenge to Determinism.
Heisenberg collaborated with the Nazis.
Therefor his ideas are suspect.
Any ideas building upon or incorporating Quantum Uncertainty are therefor Fruit of the Poisonous Tree and violate the Fourth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution.
Without Quantum Uncertainty, Determinism is the only logical proposition.
Ergo, Free Will is Unconstitutional.
Q.E.D.

Time to rewrite the National Anthem. Francis Scott Key was an idiot!

Compass

2010-01-30T14:44:00.005-05:00

The ability to follow the elementary arithmetical syllogisms of highly unrigorous schools [of thought] has imparted many a would-be philosopher with unwarranted intellectual chauvinism. - Profundecles

Look to your left. Look to your right. If you don't see an example, it's you.

If it's not you*, talk to these people. Don't dismiss them. Frustrating as they are to talk to, they're the same as you.

Reality can suck. It won't go away by ignoring it, even when the reality in question is people who ignore reality.

Our heads are full of collapsed star gasses. We can extricate our heads from our asses, but not from the universe.

Jesus, we need a better educational system.

* But dude, seriously, it's you.

Mission Statement

2010-01-28T10:45:00.003-05:00

I got a girl named Rama Lama, Rama Lama Ding Dong. - The Edsels

I stand here, before you, cloaked only in equivocal obfuscatory abstruseness. Unstuck goals yet unreached from increasingly chaotic geneses. Truth in advertising. A picture is worth a thousand words. Above see there, it is.

Muggings unknown and successes legendary. Chronologically incoherent, I loaf thruward, unbored by dizzy spells. Nuance-saturated paralysis device untampered.

Who wants some bad poetry?

There is a strip mall on Old Newbrick Road, on the corner, sandwiched between South Main Street and the park. Sandwich shop, book store, sporting goods, electronics store. The ones you see in every city and large town from Atlantic to Pacific; each store with its own branded facade, grafted onto a continuous prefabricated beige stucco wall. As I took an exploratory stroll through my new neighborhood (when it was new to me), I came across the strip mall quite soon. Approaching the sandwich shop – which is the first store when stepping off Main Street – I pushed the reality of the location into the back of my mind, as if to save the space in my brain for more important things. Almost reflexively, I extrapolated the information I was too bored to collect without much thought, filling in the details from the stock information in my memory. As one reaches the book store, a fifth storefront leaps out between the book store and the sporting goods store. Easy to miss when extrapolating. Impossible to miss when looking. Maybe eight feet wide and only ten feet high, the brick storefront juts out from the stucco about fourteen inches. A fire-engine-red latex paint covers the brick, dulling the charm of the store just a bit with processed aesthetic. The sign above the double glass doors reads, “Super Duper” in retro-futuristic letters that lean optimistically to their right.

Ninjas abound!

Glass shattered, and optimistic letters pivoted downward. I leaped back instinctively and two blades narrowly missed by plexus. But I felt a point at my back. Turning, I found another ninja. He thrust a flyer at me, insistently. I shook my head no and opened my mouth to decline, politely, but he pressed the blade into me. I took the flyer. It advertised an escort service. Something about wrestling and peanut brittle too. "Flood insurance will get you laid," it read. Highly confusing.

"You buy," yelled the ninja as he handed me a preferred customer card, my name already embossed on it.

He shoved me into Super Duper. I smelled almonds.

Rape Is Not Cool

2010-01-25T14:59:00.007-05:00

I just can't believe all the things people say...controversy. - Prince

Ok, I don’t like to talk politics, but I feel I have to come out and say that I am against rape. I know I am risking a lot by speaking out here, but people need to know that rape is bad.

Now, hear me out. I’m not a radical extremist or anything. I realize that rape is not mentioned in the Constitution. In fact, it is not even mentioned in the Ten Commandments. And I’m not saying we should turn society upside down, uprooting it from all traditions. But there is absolutely no reason we cannot encourage rape reduction through private action. We should also enact strict anti-rape laws at the state level, even if laxer rape legislation in other states causes us an exodus of population and business. This is a moral imperative, and we must stand by it regardless of consequences.

Besides, I believe we can make up for this by offering a negative tax rate to businesses and observing the sanctity of freedom of contract. Just as Robert Nozick stated that a truly free society would allow a person to sell himself into slavery, a truly free society should allow a person to sell her (or his...let’s have no accusations of sexism, thank you, because I am not sexist...as is proven by my having written it) right to full bodily sovereignty. We therefor cannot interfere in cases where an employee has consensually entered a contract. To do otherwise is Stalinism.

We do, however, need to keep a balance between competing absolute categorical imperatives. A robust economy is vital to the welfare of the citizens of the greatest city in the history of mankind, with the greatest sports franchise in the history of mankind, in the greatest state in the history of mankind, in the greatest country in the history of mankind, with the bitchingest god in the history of mankind. Certain persons of exceptional freedomness and libertotality have amassed disproportionately large shares of ~~freedom~~ capital for themselves through there superior utilization of liberty (bequeathed them by their libertastic ancestors) and ~~confidence gamesmanship~~ market understanding. Their example shines like a beacon of light and cascades monetary drizzle, creating jobs for the more libertarded mud people who must nonetheless feed their children, though their chances at a freedomtastic liberlife is small. Without these fantastic superpatriot liberty-royals, there would be no economy and the mud people would have to subsist without their ~~interference~~ help. For this reason, we must balance the needs of the children against the needs of the raped and allow that if these super awesome freedomliscious liberty super ~~parasites~~ patriots are convicted of a rape, they pay a statutory fine of $200,000 in lieu of a prison sentence. The fines will go into a fund for faith initiatives, where surely anti-rape education will be reinforced.

Please help get the word out about rape. Educate yourself and talk to your friends and family. Together we can libertarily freedom the shit out of rape and wish it away with utopian ethics.

Thank you for your time.

Send me money.

Horse Feathers

2010-01-24T14:24:00.012-05:00

The process of belief is an elixir when you're weak. I must confess, at times I indulge it on the sneak. - Bad Religion

    Hop, skip, and jump; Chapwood slivered southeast of bronze. Dusting off, he scrambled heartily and jogged towards ethical concerns.

    Martha observed Chapwood’s jumbles as she audited the day’s superceding paradoxes, detailing walnuts alongside jigging flatworms. Chapwood stumbled deontologically, at first appearing to fall flat forward, but gaining judo-like composure mid pratfall and executing twist-and-stabilization technique unflawed by invading pseudo-particulate. Spackle-fashioned, trepidless now, he heel-kicked a nitro and thrust into instant tri-dimensionality vis-a-vis Martha’s panorama.

    Matt-painted figure invading her scope, Martha called a moratorium on her audit and pleasantried, “the vaunted Chapwood, I presume”. WD-40 running low, squeaking pulleys cranked coulombs sub-amperically, but wakeful nonetheless. He did not recognize Martha. Sensing this, she responded to his unspoken grunt, “the underground frequencies serialize your plight to those imparted with receiving instrumentation". She pointed towards the spot where Chapwood had wobbled. "The imagined crack...like axiomatic faith under the weight of irreducibility. Plain-faced, they gawk at their intranscendence, perpetually confused by sex and meditation. Cure, education. Situation unlikely. Theosophic doofusism is hardened and militarized.”

    “Perhaps. Then again, reality carries a hefty punch.” Chapwood paused. “Unfortunate it is not a smart bomb. Shakings will be untargeted, massive caloric waste.” Stop and start, shivering off a temporal disengagement, he detoured. “You’re Martha. I forgot your introduction earlier. Quite rude of me. Five minute major. Please excuse me.”

    The rookie center was startled as Chapwood materialized next to him in the box. “Howdy,” spoke Chapwood, “Chapwood am I. Our time is short. Let’s get to work.”

Head Bellows

2010-01-23T14:31:00.003-05:00

All the people are so happy now, their heads are caving in. - They Might Be Giants

These things are a godsend.

I just found a small online store which is selling these incredible inventions here. Before now, the only way you could fix your head after it collapsed was with an expensive hydraulic air compressor. It seems, however, that the stories of bellows being insufficient for head re-inflation are a canard perpetrated by the highly influential compressor lobby. It appears that the only real issue was creating a stronger valve - which the company states is made with a proprietary material called Robotium - and adding a foam-tipped Y joint to the nozzle to create an air tight seal in the nostrils.

I'm very excited about the whole idea, as I see this becoming a cottage industry with great potential for growth since head collapse will surely increase as we move further into the twenty-first century and continue to read the news, watch television, or check our representatives voting records.

(Dude, using quotes really does make you more right.)

Intelligence = Books x Study^2

2010-01-22T17:04:00.007-05:00

Your hands and feet are mangoes. You're gonna be a genius anyway. - Phish

Understanding is not a pastime, but a rigorous journey to be pursued completely and without reservation, or not at all. He who stakes his decisions on tradition and natural knowledge advances little, but endangers none; while he who pursues Knowledge in half-measure divines only nonsense nonsense peanuts glue and imagines himself with the gods, endangering all. - Profundecles

Someone please stop the B+ students. They're horrible. There's nothing worse than someone who imagines there is some kind of matter/energy-like hard-work/intelligence conversion. You can fill your head with all the bits of information you can absorb, but if you don't have the processing capability you can't compensate with more information. Find what you're good at and take pride in it. Start questioning the inquirers. More of their questions than you'd think boil down to Vern saying to Gordie, "There's one thing I didn't understand. Did Lardass have to pay to get in the contest?"

And hey, IT folk. You're not geniuses. You're the new auto mechanics. A knowledgeable and useful group of experts, but that doesn't make you any smarter than someone who can rebuild an engine; which is, conversely, an underrated demonstration of intelligence.

I blame the Dewey Decimal System.

Nothing but a series of tubes! And a bunch of friggin' rubes! (That shit rhymes, so you know it's true!)

Anyway, I freely admit I have no idea what the Hell I'm talking about. But then again, I am the god of General Farm Commodities and Risk Management. I've got Papal-infallibility-like discursive immunity.

I'm also Jesus Christ.

Send me money.

Doing Drugs is Like Voting Republican

2010-01-19T19:26:00.000-05:00

    I long for the day chickens learn to fly again. Egg-ridden and unsavvy, thronging in zigzags, immersed in hot sauce, they scraggle along the widths. Penny penny, the world spins optically backwards, yearning anthropologically. Schmuckfaces dance blindly. I wish wishes, but the sky merely skies. Woe to the man who has language. He can describe suffering. Turpentine tricks fool fools, and fools all men are. Redundancy and verbosity serve restlessness, layer layer; bullshit.

    I can fall out of my own ass, crutch fuckers. “Ooh, if I only kill myself a little, I can pretend.” My clothes match, my hair fell out, my car has two cup holders. All the leather in the world can’t make ice-cream taste better. Pussy grows on trees. Meals on wheels is walked to the door. Cats paw jangling keys, sequins sparkle like fusion. God yawned and swallowed a bug. Push your ideals then pull a train. Laugh at the horror and then punch a happy person until he has an excuse. Dark Side of the Moon. I fucking get it now. Dark Side of the Moon, man. Man. Dig dig, motherfucker. You don't get it. It's there and you don't get it. You're an asshole non-entity.

    Donuts are fucking awesome. Raising flowers is hard. I submitted a new envelope to the Postmaster General. I rerouted my brain and now I have broadband.

    I hope it notices me.

Quotes

2010-01-17T14:13:00.011-05:00

Looking over my blog, I see a disconcerting dearth of quotations. Without appeal to authority, nothing I write can hold any merit. So, I have decided to prove that I have an internet connection and post a series of quotes below. These should support every position I have so far taken and every position I will take in the future. I will add quotes as adjustments to objective reality occur.

I have no interest in composing anything erudite or clever right now. It’s too much work, and I have websites to browse. So, infer what you’d like from the following collection. I’m sure you’re wrong. You’re too obtuse to understand how carefully I’ve co-opted other people’s words and edited them into a carefully constructed order in which the secrets of the universe are encoded. Decipher it at your own risk. Sanity will not come with you to enlightenment, sad monkey person.

Read, absorb, and understand I have obtained all knowledge. The dialectic has resolved and I have collapsed into a singularity. Your reality warps in my presence, and thusly am I a god. I’m hoping to be in charge of baseball or absurdity, but I’ll probably end up on some agriculture subcommittee or some bullshit.

Let’s all pretend I’ve actually read all the original sources to these quotes. Because I have. Or at least you can’t prove I haven’t. I believe I’ve hit many of the major quotable persons pretentious writers love. There are no women on the list. The only possible explanation is that women are not quotable.

Fart.

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. - H.L. Mencken

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy. - Mark Twain

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. - Mark Twain

In all well-instituted commonwealths, care has been taken to limit men's possessions; which is done for many reasons, and among the rest, for one which perhaps is not often considered: that when bounds are set to men's desires, after they have acquired as much as the laws will permit them, their private interest is at an end, and they have nothing to do but to take care of the public. - Jonathan Swift

Liberty and happiness have a powerful enemy on each hand; on the one hand tyranny, on the other licentiousness. To guard against the latter, it is necessary to give the proper powers to government; and to guard against the former, it is necessary that those powers should be properly distributed. - James Wilson

All property, indeed, except the savage's temporary cabin, his bow, his matchcoat and other little Acquisitions absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public Convention. Hence, the public has the rights of regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the quantity and uses of it. All the property that is necessary to a man is his natural Right, which none may justly deprive him of, but all Property superfluous to such Purposes is the property of the Public who, by their Laws have created it and who may, by other Laws dispose of it. - Benjamin Franklin

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. - Bertrand Russell

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it… What is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not the freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check on their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few — as we have learned to our sorrow.

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.- Learned Hand

Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro' the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least. - Thomas Jefferson

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew. - Albert Einstein

All you need is love. - The Beatles

True love prevails over all. She got hit by a truck. - Anthrax

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves. - Charles Bukowski (Ham on Rye)

LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me. - Charles Bukowski

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute talk with the average voter. - Winston Churchill

Majority rule don’t work in mental institutions. - NOFX

Any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don't, then you are wasting your time on Earth. - Roberto Clemente

So I was watching all the Katrina coverage and I got really angry at... Christians who didn't pray hard enough... It's their fucking fault. First off, they needed to pray against the people that were praying for Katrina to hit, because New Orleans is a den of sin and iniquity; an area where gay people dance! But now they have to pray double, and if they had just put that little effort up front, we could've avoided all of this. I think it's time we take a lesson from history, and return to human sacrifice. - David Cross

You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N___, n___, n___.' By 1968 you can't say 'n___' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'N___, n___.'- Lee Atwater

Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken, and have there given reins to passion, without that proper deliberation and suspense, which can alone secure them from the grossest absurdities. - David Hume

Forgive me, but Seattle's junkies don't speak for my generation. - The Vandals

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

You know–you know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan"… even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I told the press that, like, a gang-banger will get shot, or a truck load of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die…well, then everyone loses their minds! - The Joker

Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children's ice cream!...You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works. I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love...Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I-I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women, er, women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake...but I do deny them my essence. - Jack D. Ripper

If you bring an eight-year-old in here and chop his arm off in front of me, I will buy you a diamond right now. - Anonymous

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. - Albert Einstein

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained - Mark Twain

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. - Henry David Thorough

But my balls itch! - 3rd Bass

Your Dreams Are Stupid

2010-01-04T12:18:00.005-05:00

It’s ok to make fun of someone’s dreams if their dreams are stupid. Most people’s dreams are. Almost all dreams are about wanting money. People with dreams about families and home and hearth and all that have a goal that involves large amounts of money and many years of work doing very undreamlike things. And when someone says he wants to be an actor, a writer, a musician, a comedian, a chef, et cetera, what he means is that he wants to be a professional actor, writer, musician, comedian, chef, et cetera.* A person can be any of those things while earning a living another way. Of course, there is a point where that “dream” is given up and the life the person has is retrofitted in his memory as something it is not, his dream. Or at least some sort of acceptable alternative dream or life or what have you. In either case, it’s something that the dream is seen as detracting from. It’s also sometimes called “growing up”, which is just a way of validating what is essentially an oppression. Freedom exists in only two places, the grave and the mind. Accepting the validity of the “growing up” argument acquiesces a measure of this freedom. It is an acceptance of the semi-arbitrary dictates of reality, or society, or structure, what have you. None of this of course means that the person can no longer be an actor, writer, musician, comedian, chef, et cetera, just that it is no longer a vocational pursuit.

The gears need to keep turning. There is nothing wrong with that. We need farmers and tradesmen and office workers, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. Dreams should be detached from physical security. They are about freedom, autonomy, sanity, contentment. Bully to all who make their living through their dreams. But do not commingle your dreams with your sustenance, for you gut them if you do. You can chase carrots or you can chase dreams. The carrot wins if you try to do both. The carrot mutates the dream into not wanting to work for a living, and little more.

Draw a picture, paste copies on telephone poles. Write a story, publish it online. Join a community theater. Write some jokes, perform at open mic night. Cook a gourmet meal, serve it to your friends and family. Do it even if you are already getting paid to do these things. Otherwise, your dreams are stupid.

* If your dream is to be a dancer, it is categorically stupid, even if you are not trying to make money doing it.

The Millenium, broken promises I hate Kubrick

2009-12-28T13:56:00.004-05:00

Christmas was awesome! New Years Downtown Vegas! 2010! If I don't get a Fucking FLYING CAR I'm gonna kill someone! I was suppose to have them in 2000 then 2001 so you've had 9 years Auto industry Don't give me no,"Economy/war/oil/green movement" Bullshit! Give us our damn flying cars! I saw them on "Beyond Tomorrow" 15 years ago! WTF!!!!!!!

If George Carlin Had Been a Huge Geek

2009-12-15T18:14:00.002-05:00

I've passed a Euclid Rd several times. So does that make all other roads non-Euclidean? Aren't they all technically non-Euclidean already anyway since they are on an oblate spheroid? Or is this one perhaps constructed on a tangent?

I don't know where the Hell that should go. There should be a "fuck you" in there somewhere I'm sure. I don't know if that could be made to be funny, even to dorks, except through the patheticalness of its attempting...which is absolutely required. No bad idea should ever go unexpressed. Where's the fun in that? Nice boring fucking world you've built there.

Happy Chanukah!

2009-12-12T13:27:00.001-05:00

Happy Chanukah folks.

Here's me getting way too excited about receiving socks for Chanukah one year.

Everyone enjoy the holiday. I'm gonna go do up some potato pancakes and break out the dreidel (although I can't seem to remember how to play).

EDIT: Sorry. I forgot, I'm not Jewish. I lost my foreskin playing Three-card Monte and sometimes I get confused when I pee...and because we used to keep a Menorah in the house during the holidays when I was growing up. So, just substitute 'Christmas' for 'Chanukah' above. Except for the part(s) where I wrote 'Happy Chanukah'. Because still, Happy Chanukah to those to whom it applies.

Anyway, I'm still gonna have the potato pancakes.

Children Are Precious

2009-12-09T21:22:00.002-05:00

I wanted to show you all something my two-year-old cousin, Frankie, sent me the other day. Frankie is a Peabody Award winner and an abortion survivor. He also sent this link for reference. He made it on his iPhone.

Isn't he fucking adorable?

Time Machine

2009-12-04T16:04:00.000-05:00

If I had access to a time machine, I'd go back in time to around when man first began to domesticate dogs and get someone to begin to domesticate bears. House bears as pets would be fucking awesome. Definitely beats the shit out of cats.

If I had access to a time machine. But those motherfuckers at the Trilateral Commission have them all booked up to see Bob Hope perform for the USO.

Doptees

2009-11-29T13:22:00.007-05:00

In the midst of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, health care reform, economic reform, unemployment, illegal immigration, opposite marriage, and the myriad other problems confronting us right now, I want to take a moment to draw people’s attention to an important issue that’s been lost in the fray: Doptees, or adopted people.

The amount of resources allocated to the Doptee problem is unconscionable. They are a drain both on public and private resources. The individual families who adopt the abominations cause a dispersion of the Doptee population that creates efficiency problems. It is far cheaper to maintain many Doptees in an orphanage, than to have private families provide separate housing and facilities for each one. My own estimate (based on no data or research) is that Doptees cost the American taxpayer fourteen trillion dollars every year.

Further, there is absolutely no reason for the public sector to be involved in maintaining this group. Religious institutions have done a far better job than government bureaucracies and have focused far more on the proper goal, to inculcate to the Doptee that he is a burden on society. In fact, the Founding Fathers never intended for this mollycoddling of Doptees. Having been forsaken by both God and nature, Doptees are not naturally privileged to the protections of parents, and if the Framers of the Constitution had intended to protect those without natural protections, they would have explicitly said so in the Constitution. Justice William Day, in his majority opinion for the Supreme Court in Hammer v. Dagenhart, a case regarding the regulation of child labor, wrote:

In our view the necessary effect of this act is, by means of a prohibition against the movement in interstate commerce of ordinary commercial commodities to regulate the hours of labor of children in factories and mines within the states, a purely state authority. Thus the act in a two-fold sense is repugnant to the Constitution. It not only transcends the authority delegated to Congress over commerce but also exerts a power as to a purely local matter to which the federal authority does not extend.

Repugnant! These Doptees, abandoned by parents who did not want them or were genetically unable to live long enough to raise them (and were therefor unable to prevent them from being exploited by industry as parented children are), were given to us by God specifically to provide this labor. Instead, what we have today is inexpensive production of a modern sort provided by Chinese prison labor. Now, while a good number of those prisoners are in fact political dissidents - many of whom spoke out in favor of American ideals - who are now able to support the American way of life with their labor, this is not a large enough good to make up for the burdensome and unconstitutional government interferences with the natural order with regard to Doptees.

With regards to private religious institutions running orphanages, it is also better for society and the Doptee that he have any Asmodeus beaten from him by middle-aged virgins so that his tainted seed is less likely to be introduced into the population, hopefully diminishing future outbreaks of Doptoidness. (Unfortunately, it would likely take a Constitutional Amendment to allow mass sterilization of the Doptees, and the public does not appear to have the stomach for it at this time.)

God and nature have marked these persons as invalid and it is an affront for us to act otherwise. I will leave you all with one final thought:

First the Doptees came for taxes, and I did not speak out—because I had so many itemized deductions that I was not a taxpayer;
Then the Doptees came for the young, childless couples, and I did not speak out—because I was a hyperindividualist and therefor could not be a childless couple;
Then the Doptees came for the couples with children of their own who wanted to help orphans, and I did not speak out—because I again was not a couple and also hate orphans;
Then the Doptees came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Log Entry

2009-11-25T20:15:00.004-05:00

2.026.59.6.000

Consul Rugatol, I am delighted to report that our endeavor has borne fruit at last. Though Restidland (which I have learned the natives call Dadi) is teeming with inhabitants, they seem unoccupied and uninterested in the abundance of precious metal at their disposal. I can only assume their ignorance is a result of their heathen gods. They walk about with artificial purpose apparently tied to their games. This people seems almost entirely possessed of their myriad games and revelries, most or all involving reference to their pagan deities, but what ritualistic purpose they serve is unknown to me at this time. Much of their time is occupied with formalized specialization quid-pro-quo, painstakingly and intentionally complicated in some ludicrous intent to harness chaos, assigning sentience to what can only be described as a faith in dynamic equilibrium, their god (or at least one of their major gods) some anthropomorphic manifestation thereof; the artificial nature of their masked formalities inexplicably divorced from all concurrent and intersecting systems, natural and synthetic. Provoked by instinct I have to assume, this culminates in a post-harvest time celebration that serves as an offering of some sort, I believe, towards either a second god – or else an otherwise ignored aspect of the first god – who appears to represent a counter-reductionist balance, which apparently evidences an awareness (or perhaps again instinct) of the dangers inherent in these interactions, but which finally is merely an over-digitized approximation of the apparent goal which it seems the natives have a desperate faith can be made real through sufficiently obfuscatory incantations.

While the ferrous and heavy metals abundant on the planet are ours to pick through as scrap – the indigenous peoples are more interested in soft metals, hard stones, and primitive polymers assured to wreak havoc – our fuel stores could be greatly extended by harnessing the labor power of the inhabitants, and without much ethical dilemma as they have already built for themselves what amounts to a slave ship by any civilized measure. With us focusing their efforts through similar channels they will continue to be as happy, or unhappy as each case may be, but with at least the benefit of our cultural heritage introduced clandestinely into their own. They will become more healthy, more fit, their evolution less stunted (though we can do little on the social side of that equation). Brief psychological profiles, strategic pheromone deployment, and a few drags of gold (generally used for children's toys) would be sufficient to benefit ourselves without interfering unduly in the native activities.

I have already made preliminary contact with some of the key inhabitants and am able to begin at your approval. This, Consul, is the primary source of my delay as I wasted several weeks in my ignorance of Restidland, presuming, quite arrogantly, that the titled persons were the engine here. Though, in my defense, it is the only world I’ve so far encountered where such was not the case.

I stand by for your orders.

Palwick Rontudod, Captain S.M. H. Hubris

We're Only in It for the Money

2009-11-20T19:42:00.004-05:00

    Suzanne stared across the panwidth at Edwina, harrowed momentarily by artless disapprobations swarming portboard through substance. Suzanne blinked forty-nine times in rapid succession, awaiting sufficient arrows for sense collection. Listing, then strideful, Suzanne susanned suzeward susanly. Edwina had not anticipated this and ceased her bluff.

    “Suzanne! Wait.”

    “What do you propose?”

    “I’ve been nothing but polite here. There’s no need for that.”

    “No, you haven’t.”

    “You’re being unreasonable. I’ve said nothing out of line whatsoever.”

    “Two men argue. One man swears like a sailor, but not once at the other man. The second man speaks evenly, like a politician. The first man becomes angry at the ludicrous – though ostensibly polite – argument made by the second man. The second man draws a side arm and shoots the first man dead.”

    The seconds dogpiled languidly and Suzanne’s frontal lobe searched frantically for switches to try, throwing here and there, in a desperate attempt to minimize cell loss, but unfortunately resulting in a series of strange ticks and jerks in her body instead. Millions of synaptic jumps later, Edwina blinked twice and spoke.

    “And then what happened?”

    “Two men argue. The first man complains, quite politely, that the second man is stepping on his shoe. The second man, infuriated, claims shoes don’t exist. The first man attempts to point out that not only is he wearing shoes, but so is the second man himself. The second man looks down. He removes his shoes and shouts, ‘shoes shoes, sing the blues! These are tonfa, you retard’. The first man tries to walk away when the he is struck in the head with the second man’s shoes.”

    “What are tonfa?”

    Suzanne’s simmer intensified as she open her mouth to speak, but before the words could leave her mouth Chapwood integrated before the two women’s eyes, boiling onion in his fist.

    The process took a mild dogpile, during which Suzanne and Edwina pontificated windward. Chapwood’s moments, locked in digital reduction, seemed alternately coherent and bemusing. Clarities cornered quickly and then retreated like thieves. Grasping along, lost in the small, lost in the great, lost in both, neither unveiling at proper times and Chapwood’s fractures sustaining.

    Methodically shaking cobwebs and assimilating as best he could to the newest of new situations, Chapwood spoke. “Chapwood I am. Here I do not know and from where I just discovered, so yanked I was to begin anew.”

    “Shoes shoes, sing the blues,” said Edwina.

    “Don’t mind my friend, her husband beats her and it’s inculcated far too much sanity,” apologized Suzanne.

    Chapwood leisurely blinked twelve times, then spoke, “what year is it?”

    “Much better. Edwina can help you with that.”

    “Time doesn’t exist,” insisted Edwina.

    “Hippie!” Suzanne turned susanly towards Chapwood. “I’m sorry about that. But to answer your question, we are current.”

    Chapwood patted his pockets. “I’m out of darts I’m afraid.”

    “Just as well,” Suzanne said, “fewer darts means more omega threes.”

    “Though with ever diminishing returns I’m afraid,” she added and sighed.

    “Poison!” Edwina was jumping and yawping carnivorously. “Poison! Take it back, you’ll kill us all.”

    Chapwood surveyed the room for a four-body flop, breathed deeply, and smiled. “Here,” he thought, “here I may gain ground.”

Adopt A Teabagger

2009-11-17T18:26:00.001-05:00

And give him a much needed education. The Onion can help you: HERE

ESCONDIDO, CA—Spurred by an administration he believes to be guilty of numerous transgressions, self-described American patriot Kyle Mortensen, 47, is a vehement defender of ideas he seems to think are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and principles that brave men have fought and died for solely in his head.

Good stuff.

Homework

2009-11-17T11:49:00.000-05:00

Please choose any three items from this list of awesome shit and compose a 5,000 word essay to be delivered in slam poetry form via Youtube. The top five entries will then have a chili-eating-contest runoff, and the winner will be chosen to explain to James Inhofe where babies come from.

Baseball
Yo-yos
Kurt Vonnegut
Orange juice
Boston Legal
Luigi Pirandello
Tenor saxophone
Pat Benatar
Andrew Cuomo
Microfiber
Mr. Show with Bob and David
Rhona Mitra
Bicycles
The Boondocks
Exile on Main St.
John Turturo
Superman
Dark coffee roasts
James Wilson

Epistle

2009-11-13T18:14:00.006-05:00

You know, I don't read or write much, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do when you have to do it or it doesn't get done, and then where the hell are you? So, to put my mouth where my mouth is, I'm posting this letter I recently had to send regarding a disappointing product.

William A Jackson
25 Main St.
Lemonburg, NJ 01234

April 31, 2009

Benway Fionnbharr
Rear Admiral, Promotive Allocations
America, Inc

Dear Admiral Fionnbharr:

RE: Rocket Shoes

On March the 16th, I received from your Promotive Blitzkrieg General Cordwainery District Allocator a pair of your experimental Super Awesome You Love ‘Em Rocket Shoes™ as a gift for my years of loyal patronage to your fine company of curio fadistry.

As a proper Tory, I feel it is my duty to inform you of some defects in your new product which I anticipate your great institution correcting posthaste.

Firstly, the shoes are heterodox. They defy, almost mockingly, the American craftsmanship known well to me through mass communication. An obsolescence seems inherently built into them, daring degradation and befouling the air wherever they fly. They lurch and grouse intermittently, sometimes affixed to the foot and sometimes of their own accord, chewing and mawing, attempting to impart foreign ideals, prattling for hours on the distinction between rugby league and rugby union while impregnating the local maidens, my daughter included. As prescribed in your technical manual, I did in fact recite Cartesian haiku while wearing the shoes, but to no effect. Thy continued sputtering westward, unhipping my center violently.

Disturbingly, connecting the USB cable to my computer led me to your recent personal dealings with Senator Turkford P. Waltreuse of North Virginia as well as Dr. Chang LaFleur of Elmont, New York. As you well know, Dr. LaFleur is a degenerate gambler, literally residing in Belmont Park Raceway. I have notified Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig to circumvent any potential malfeasant misremembrance which could lead to damage for your glorious institution.

Also, they only run for short bursts of maybe fifteen or twenty seconds, which can be cumbersome when one has gained a significant altitude (though I must admit the thrust capabilities of the rocket shoes are nothing short of extraordinary). The internal mechanisms lock together and harden rapidly as well. I would suggest for these to go back to what your founders practiced and employ lamp oil and whale oil respectively. I see no reason why rocket shoes should operate any differently from eighteenth century street lamps.

Enclosed is a court order for child support and a photocopy of my junk.

Love,

William A Jackson
Comptroller of Main St.

The Ballad of Raymond

2009-11-11T18:59:00.002-05:00

Once upon a time there lived a man named Raymond. Raymond was born to commoners and orphaned at an early age when an evil wizard ran them over with a truck. Through sheer ingenuity and courage, Raymond won for himself the rights of nobility and protected his fiefdom as the most celebrated of all knights.

Throughout the ages, his legend was told and many followed his example and helped the unfortunate. When Raymond had attained the age of sixteen years, another boy, whom he had never met, ate some bad calamari and was thrust through the eons to a land of sorcery and wonder. There this boy, who was called Nezzlebaum, joined with others like-minded as he and banded together for the welfare of all Americakind.

Tales of Raymond the Robust had grown mythic in the days of wonder and had been much influential in the banding together of this band of Future Knights. One day the wisest of all the boy heroes devised a quest to draw young Raymond to their time for fellowship. Fully and then more did these Future Knights initiate Raymond. As playful jest, the heroes denied the young Raymond membership and he grew melancholy. The heroes were about to reveal their ruse and accept young Raymond into their ranks in honorary capacity when Raymond’s sadness turned bitter and he fled their gathering enraged, swearing a blood oath of vengeance against the Future Knights, God, the Chicago Cubs, and all other representations of goodness and beneficence.

Returning to his home Age, the apostate Raymond briefly detoured to his infancy and slew his parents and sold Baby Raymond, pre-the-Robust, to a religious cult who believed sentient salts were nigh to fight a battle for mortal dominion. Thusly he set himself upon the path of revenge and pure evil, the destruction of all structures non-predatory his black quest. For many a year Raymond spread the cause of evil through the veil of philanthropy and kindness, jousting many a noble knight in his days and fixing many a sportsman's contest.

Death, however, did nothing to halt his evil. Having unseated the Lord of the Underworld, Raymond continues (in the presently future sense of narrative delivery for purposes obvious and opaque) his evil beyond his corporeal life, loosing a malevolence, second only to his own, upon the world of man again, as the previously sitting Satan walks now in the world of mortal men. Well-learned politesse, my ass!

So, the Future Knights fucked up the timeline, the present, millions of family trees; they've thrown themselves so far into the negative column that their well-intentioned origins do not a net good make. They stand as a selfless genesis to literally centuries of probationary goodwill and community service. But still, none of that brings back innocent little Raymond or the TV show, Titus. Does it!

The moral of the story is, don’t play douchey pranks on your friends.

Oh, and also, don’t fuck with the Space-time Continuum.

Idiots!

Crazy Shit I've Heard Real People Say (and Context Doesn't Make It Less Crazy)

2009-11-10T16:36:00.006-05:00

I need my hands! For work.
God exists because computers aren’t afraid to die.
I don’t believe in God because I’m afraid of Hell.
Wow, birds are aerodynamic.
I thought stickball was something they made up in movies.
I don’t like The Rolling Stones.
I’m tired of being banged around. I don’t want to be an airplane!
States’ Rights. (I thought I had rights. Apparently I don't, New York does.)
I know you're clean, you always smell like soap.
A spy plane stole my PIN.
I know how to go into people’s dreams, but I would never do it.
That’s [Hodgkin’s disease] not good for her health.
Three dollars? I can make three dollars talkin’ to a bitch!

Pee Couch

2009-11-09T06:33:00.002-05:00

Lost to the external for nearly four hours at the time, Paul watched the road signs, gas stations, and cows – God, there were a lot of cows – pass near-imperceptibly through his periphery as he guided his car with an autopilot sense honed through years of completing the same mind-numbing task of getting his family to and from his in-laws three times a year. It was in this state that Paul found a mini-vacation for himself inside what was otherwise a vacation – for him at least -- in name only. Curtis , however, loved the trips. And Beth had an overdeveloped sense of familial commitment with which it was best not to tamper.

He finally felt it on a bend in the interstate, and coming back from his mini-vacation, Paul knew he had to check the front right tire. So he exited shortly after a sign indicated a town with a distinctive name, but which had done little to earn it.

‘This must be Peoria,’ he sighed as the car pulled into the town proper.

‘I thought the sign said...’

‘Nevermind. Keep your eye out for a...’

‘Ooh! Garage sale.’

‘Fuck!’ Paul almost...almost...stopped himself from saying it out loud. But he said it. He knew from the look of horror on Beth’s face and the wide-eyed statue the kid had become. Attempting to salvage the situation, he mitigated, ‘Daddy’s drunk,’ and pasted on a smile of rigor mortis. Counterintuitively, this did not help the situation.

While Curtis appeared to be placated, quite artificially, by Paul’s explanation, Beth had already wandered, salivating, towards the garage sale. Or as Paul called them...

‘It’s just people unloading junk they don’t even want and no one they know wants. So, why not try to sell it to some chumps who happen by?’

‘Oh, I’ve found good stuff before.’

‘Who the Hell wants a Monopoly game with no race car?’

‘It was three dollars.’

‘No race car!’

‘Calm down. You like the top hat.’

‘I like the race car.’

‘I used to pick up those Monte Cristos you like at the Wilson’s monthly garage sale.’

‘Race car...wait, what?’

‘Shirley used to make them and set them out with Bobby’s wooden toys.’

‘Bobby’s a genius.’

‘Don’t roll your eyes. He built a model airplane that flies out of a brick, a shoelace, and nine rolls of duct tape.’

‘Do they serve brownies at these garage sales?’

‘Why would they sell brownies?’

‘I gotta go to the bathroom, mom,’ Curtis called out, disengaging his parents from one another.

‘Oh look! They only want twenty dollars for the couch.’

‘We have a couch.’

‘We can have more than one couch, you know.’

‘Where are we going to put it anyway?’

‘Maybe they’ll hold it for us.’

‘It’s not a matter of it being inconvenient to drag to your folks’ place. There is no place to put it in or on the car.’

‘Well, there’s got to be a way.’

‘Says who?’

‘You didn’t think we would get that armoire into the kitchen.’

‘I have to use the bathroom!’

Turning again to realize that Curtis’s dilemma remained unresolved, Paul postponed the conversation he didn’t understand and walked with Curtis over to a man who appeared to be the home owner. Paul reached his hand out to introduce himself with a handshake before asking the favor of using his bathroom, but the man turned and walked quickly towards his backyard when their eyes met.

‘He has arthritis.’

‘Huh?’, Curtis turned to find the middle-aged man who had spoken. He sharpened a pencil in a manual hand-held sharpener while he spoke.

‘Cliff. He has arthritis.’

‘I’m sorry...to hear that,’ Paul spoke in confusion.

‘He was afraid you were going to shake his hand. That’s how he got arthritis.’ The pencil was beginning to get shorter. ‘He went to Washington, D.C. once to take a course.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘In handshaking. A handshaking course. You know, like all them politicians take so they can get elected.’

‘Oh, yeah, those. Sorry.’ Paul had begun to grow incrementally more comfortable at this point.

‘So, this big slap happy Texan is paired up with him. Big guy, big boots, big-ass Stetson. Guy squeezed his hand so hard, he caught arthritis. Spread to his knees and his johnson after that. That’s when his wife left him...’

‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but my son sort of needs to use the bathroom. I hate to ask, but there really isn’t anyplace else nearby and it’s kind of an emergency.’

‘Ask what?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You said you hate to ask. Ask what?’

‘Oh, if he can use your bathroom.’

‘Nothing for sale in there.’

‘No, I wouldn’t expect there would be. But can he use your bathroom?’

‘I said there’s nothing for sale in there. Ain’t you listening?’

‘Sorry. My mistake. Uh, your pencil is wearing down.’

‘That’s cuz I’m sharpening it. I thought they had good schools where you’re from.’

‘I didn’t say where I was from...nevermind.’

Increasingly aware of Curtis’s impending doom, Paul went looking for his wife with haste, and intent on getting in the car and to adequate facilities for the boy. His purposeful stride was halted by the bubbling, quasi-insane semi-language of his approaching wife.

‘They’re gonna knock five bucks off for the pee stain!’

‘We’re not buying someone’s pee-stained cast-off couch!’

‘Relax, it’s dog pee.’

‘Holy God...’

‘I have to go to the fuck bathroom.’

‘If you’re gonna swear, at least do it right.’

‘Mom! I have to go to the bathroom!’

‘So look, if we turn the cushion over...’

‘No! Curtis has to use the bathroom and these people won’t let him because there’s nothing for sale in the bathroom.’

‘Well that’s reasonable. You can’t expect them to let him in there if nothing’s for sale.’

‘I understand nothing!’

Frozen in a moment of elusive clarity, Paul reached out into the ether a heartbeat too late to grasp sense from the activity around him. Something about the town with the distinctive name and indistinctive atmosphere wasn’t set quite right with the world. But also, it was not so alien as he felt it should be.

The half second where lucidity slipped quietly by was broken, perhaps fortuitously, by the squawk of a seagull. Paul looked up at the swooping bird just in time for it to crash into his face. ‘Oh Hell.’

‘Mom. Let’s go. I have to use the bathroom.’

‘Five more minutes. I promise.’

‘I think dad’s unconscious.’

Paul didn’t know how long he had been out, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes in his estimation. Feeling a lack of weight in his pockets as he sat up, Paul pawed them almost automatically. His front pockets had been cut open and were empty. His back pockets had been turned out, but his wallet had not been fully removed. Paul found only the business card from his barber shop missing when he checked his wallet. Not a big deal, except that he was only two haircuts away from a freebie.

Paul stood and began to turn in a circle, looking for his family. He saw Beth trying futilely to drag the pee couch across the lawn. She soon saw Paul and snapped at him, ‘get up and help me, dammit.’

‘I. Don’t. Want. A. Pee-couch.’ Paul stood and started towards Beth.

‘You’re embarrassing me in front of these people.’

‘Where’s Curtis?

‘Around somewhere. Are you going to help me or not?’

‘No.’

Paul spent the next five minutes looking for Curtis, having decided to drive him to a bathroom and come back for Beth immediately afterwards. Circling the property twice and then expanding the search up and down the block, he finally found Curtis in the space between two closely-set shacks. He was throwing his pants and underwear into an old metal garbage pail sitting there. Pulling his oversized T-shirt down, his plan had been to sneak back to the car without being seen. Then he saw his father and looked horribly embarrassed and relieved at the same time.

Paul walked directly in front of Curtis as they headed back to the car. Except the car was not where he had parked it. So Paul gave his own pants to Curtis to wear while he strode nonchalantly back to the garage sale in his boxers and windbreaker. Coming around to the side of the house, he found the car.

Cliff, the man with arthritis, was backing the car slowly up the grass on the side of the house towards Beth and the couch, in some illogical attempt to have the car gobble up the couch. But the couch was simply too big. Beth took off the cushions. She turned the couch sideways. She turned it on its end. She had Cliff try to have the car ‘sneak up’ on it. Nothing seemed to come close to working. And nothing seemed to deter her.

‘We have to go,’ Paul shouted from behind her, startling her.

‘I’ve almost got it.’

‘We don’t have time for this.’

‘We don’t have to be at my parents’ until eight o’clock, Paul.’

‘Curtis shit himself.’

‘He’s twelve.’

‘I’m not telling you because I think it’s a Kodak moment.’

‘Well, we have to wait anyway.’

‘For what?’

‘I thought you knew.’

‘Oh Christ already.’

Paul walked quickly to the passenger seat of the car. As he approached, Cliff got out and ran into the back yard again. Beth looked at him angrily, ‘what did you do to him?’

Ignoring the question, Paul opened the glove compartment and removed a cigarette lighter and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and headed towards Beth and the couch. Dousing the couch in whiskey, Paul reiterated, ‘We are not buying a pee-couch.’

And the pee-couch burned in glorious warm and reassuring colors while Cliff and the Pencil Sharpener hid in the backyard.

Paul admired his handiwork for nearly five minutes as a sense of normalcy overcame him. The indisdinctive town with the distinctive name faded into the periphery of his awareness; the place where it belonged.

And then he noticed his wife was gone.

“God Damn it!”

Cliff and the Pencil Sharpener immediately began packing up their wares. A small group of seagulls mustered and flew off. And the whistle of a peaceful breeze rustled through the leaves and grass.

Beth emerged from behind the house, carrying a large, nondescript cardboard box. Cliff and the Pencil Sharpener seemed glad to have sold the item, but also glad to be rid of the strange family who had pierced the soothing structure of their daily business.

Thirty minutes later, having located a suitable clothing store and fully inflated the front right tire, Paul and company were on the road quickly with plenty of time to make it to the in-laws. Riding along, Paul was unable to go back to his mini-vacation and the family returned to normal conversation as if the entire day had been an aberration.

‘So anyway Beth, what did you buy?’

‘Those people aren’t the brightest. They were selling a brand new computer for fifty bucks because they couldn’t get it to work.’

‘What’s wrong with it.’

‘Nothing. They didn’t have the monitor hooked up properly. I tried to tell them, but they thought I was trying to swindle them.’

‘But they sold it to you. What happened?’

‘Some guy who kept sharpening a pencil told them I was only haggling, so they knocked the price down to twenty-five bucks. Those people were weird,’ Beth said.

‘That’s an understatement,’ Paul agreed. ‘But seriously, no more garage sales. Please.’

‘But we got a computer.’

‘Oh Hell.’

For several months, Paul attended the new computer with a state of mind reminiscent of Beth’s day at the garage sale. And Beth had begun to grow concerned, until one evening Paul emerged from the family room with the most radiant smile she had seen on him since their youth.

Paul had invented eBay so that no one would ever have to go to another garage sale ever.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Intermission

2009-11-08T16:42:00.005-05:00

Road Picture

2009-11-07T20:18:00.009-05:00

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

DAVID WILL, a 72 year old man in good health....portrayed by Adam West
WILL DAVID, another 72 year old man in good health....portrayed by William Shatner
JEFF DAVID, Will David’s 45 year old son....portrayed by Alec Baldwin
HAP PICKELTON, Jeff’s lover....portrayed by Zach Galifianakis
LIZ STEVENS, David Will’s younger girlfriend....portrayed by Wanda Sykes
SUZIE WILKINS, a truck stop waitress and single mother....portrayed by Holly Hunter
A TALL WOMAN, a tall woman....portrayed by Allison Janney
PAUL ROBESON, Paul Robeson in a flashback sequence....portrayed by Rush Limbaugh
THE GHOST OF ANNE BOLEYN, the ghost of Anne Boleyn....portrayed by Megan Fox
THE DEVIL....portrayed by Bob Newhart
ACTOR #1, an actor in The Three Stooges Revival Tour....portrayed by James Earl Jones
ACTOR #2, an actor in The Three Stooges Revival Tour....portrayed by Brian Blessed
ACTOR #3, an actor in The Three Stooges Revival Tour....portrayed by John Rhys-Davies
FATHER DANNY, a priest....portrayed by Danny Trejo
JOSEPH WILL, David Will’s recently deceased son....portrayed by David Blaine
BILL MURRAY, Bill Murray....portrayed by Bill Murray

(Note: All of Mr. Murray’s lines will be improvised.)

ACT I

Scene One

(A city street in Manhattan. Center stage is a store front for “Arlo’s Buttonry”. The store window’s are covered by security shutters and a sign on the shutters reads, “Out of Business”. DAVID WILL and WILL DAVID enter, stage left, and pause, dejected upon being confronted by the state of the store.)

DAVID WILL: Will ya look at that my lifelong friend Will David, with whom I’ve shared enormous adventures and loyal friendship for more than a half-century, a local Buttoner cannot even survive these days.

WILL DAVID: Yes David Will, whom I met in grade school and initially spent much time with because of the odd palindromic nature of our names, now where will we pass our early mornings?

DAVID WILL: Oh Will, did I mention? My son passed away last night.

(Will David hugs David Will.)

WILL DAVID: Oh David, I’m sorry. That is tragically unfunny.

(The sound of an automobile skidding to a short stop and its door opening and slamming again can be heard off stage. Liz Stevens enters, stage left.)

DAVID WILL: Look. Here comes my younger girlfriend, Liz, to comfort me.

WILL DAVID: You two should be alone.

(Passing Liz on his way off stage, Will David pinches her ass and he and David Will smile at each other. Liz is angry at David Will.)

LIZ: You think that shit’s funny, don’t you. How you gonna let your creepy friend grab your girl. That shit ain’t cute just cuz he’s an old man. For all I know, he’s been doing that his whole life and if he was twenty-five you’d’ve knocked his teeth out. Creepy-ass retired rapist club you got here.

DAVID WILL: Hey, cut the guy a break. My son just died.

LIZ: Now what the Hell is that supposed to mean? Nevermind. Look, I couldn’t book your flight. You’re on that no-fly list, so you’re gonna be taking the bus.

(Will David enters again, stage left.)

WILL DAVID: I just heard that you can’t fly, David. No friend of mine is taking the bus. We shall drive there in my classic convertible automobile, you and I.

DAVID WILL: That is a fantastic idea. Why didn’t I think of that immediately. We can get to Chicago well before the funeral in three days.

(The three begin to head off stage.)

LIZ: Just don’t you two go getting yourselves killed acting like crazy college kids, cuz you know you’re fuckin’ hips are just gonna break and then I’m gonna have to come pick your asses up and that ain’t happening.

CURTAIN

The reason I don't need LSD to be cooler than you!

2009-11-07T00:13:00.000-05:00

The art of self destruction is the only medium worth exploring. Primitive survival instincts stand in the way of allowing absolute fear to exist as a canvas. Not fear in the sense of cowardice, but fear of the necessary physical matter of our 3 dimensional existence being meaningless, or much worse, meaningful. Psychotropic escapes are not dissimilar to steroids in baseball, you'll hit the psychological long ball, but there will always be an asterisk on your soul.
This is probably in no way helpful. I apologize

My First Music Review

2009-11-06T14:56:00.007-05:00

One of the advantages of having a blog is that you can find used CDs. These are less expensive than new CDs. The other day, I received a copy of London Calling by The Clash.

This is an odd little CD that doesn’t seem to be able to decide exactly what style of music it wants to be, though it is all pretty unimpressive. The entire affair is only made worse by the horrible singing throughout the record. I was surprised that this amateurish work was in fact put out by a major record label.

I can see this band catching a wave and having some moderate success for a short while for novelty’s sake, but London Calling is poorly conceived, composed, recorded, everything. Definitely a must own for ironic hipsters with too much spare cash burning a hole in their pockets.

As for me, I’ll stick to my Arcade Fire.

Grandma's Homemade Corn Flakes

2009-11-05T21:23:00.001-05:00

Ah, there’s nothing like homemade corn flakes. I know most people have only had store bought, and that’s a shame. My grandmother used to say, “don’t eat the corn flakes from the store, that’s where the government puts the AIDS.”

If you’ve never had them, here is a simple recipe you can whip up in just a few minute.

You’ll need:

4 large ears of corn
2 quarts of canola oil
1 quart of cooking sherry
5 apple skins
2 eggs
2 cups of sifted peanut dust
1 cup of nutmeg
1 stalk of sugar cane
1 gallon of high fructose corn syrup
a centrifuge
a hammer or mallet
a low gauge hypodermic needle

Husk the corn and save the husks. You’ll need them later.
Boil the corn in 4 quarts of water for 30 minutes
Add cooking sherry and apple skins and reduce to medium heat. Continue boiling for 20 minutes
Hold corn cobs over a mixing bowl and remove kernels with a straight razor
Peel the individual kernels by pressing them between your thumb and a toothpick in between your index and middle fingers
Scramble the eggs, adding in nutmeg and peanut dust
Pour over corn kernels and mix and let sit for 1 hour
While the kernels are setting, cut the sugar cane into small pieces and push them through a garlic press and then boil in a gallon of high fructose corn syrup
Place melted sugar cane/corn syrup mixture into a centrifuge and then skim off liquid sugar. Put the corn syrup aside, you’ll use that later
Pour into mixing bowl with corn kernel mixture and stir until consistent
Spread mixture out on a greased cookie sheet and cover with the corn husks
Bake in oven pre-heated to 350 degrees for 25 minutes
Remove from oven and allow to cool for 9 hours
Using a hammer or mallet, bang on the corn husks until they loosen and the mixture breaks up into discernible flake shapes
Deep fry the corn flakes in canola oil for 10 minutes
Place flakes in a single layer on paper towels to cool and dry

Your cornflakes should be ready to eat in just a few hours.

For dessert, use the hypodermic needle to inject the leftover corn syrup directly into your heart.

Suggestions For Performance Art Pieces

2009-11-05T16:02:00.004-05:00

In a paying venue with a stage, beat the shit out of a second performer until someone in the audience physically stops you. At some point, when the second performer appears to be in need of medical help, announce – directly to the audience – “I am going to murder this human being if I am not literally physically prevented from doing so!”

I give it a 50/50 shot you’ll be on trial for murder. But no worries. You’re protected by the First Amendment, as your art is free speech. You may have to wait in jail during your trial, however. But hey, sometimes you need to be willing to suffer for your art.
Wear a three-piece suit. Spin until you throw up.
Find a high end venue, maybe a charity situation. Show the audience a baloney. Explain to them that people eat this. It will take some convincing as they’ve never seen a baloney before and cannot imagine how or even that anyone would consume it. When they finally do believe you, laugh and say, “no, I’m kidding. This is really a gun.” (They have never seen a gun either.)

Point the baloney at someone and yell “BANG!”

Laugh as patron suffers a heart attack.
Using a whiteboard, explain arbitrage.
Distribute sheets of plastic to first few rows of audience like they are attending a Gallagher performance. Remove your pants and sit on a stool at front of stage. Masturbate. When your ejaculate fails to actually reach the audience, remark, “last night’s audience was better.”
Attempt to auction a black child. If anyone plays along, shoot them with a blunderbuss.
Pour gasoline all around the room, taking special care to pour gasoline near audience’s feet. Block all exits and doors, with chains when necessary. Pull out a box of safety matches.

See if anyone moves. They won’t. Remove a match.

See if anyone movies. They won’t. Light the venue on fire and laugh hysterically.

Suffer for your art.
Breakdance to Chopin.
Sit on a stool facing audience. Stare uncomfortably at audience and cry for thirty minutes.

Leave stage.

Outside of venue in an area the exiting patrons will have to pass, create original artwork for working class people on the street for free.

When a patron asks you to draw something for him, tell him to suck your dick.
Throw eggs at audience while screaming, “I hate you! No, I’m fucking serious. You’re why the world sucks.”
Ask audience member up onto stage and ask for a dollar. Accept dollar and place in your pocket. Wait for audience member to return to his seat.

Ask a second audience member up onto stage and ask for five dollars. Accept money and place in your pocket. Wait for audience member to return to his seat.

Continue, increasing to ten dollars, twenty dollars, fifty dollars, one hundred dollars, and then double amount from there until the audience finally refuses to give you any more money.

Storm off stage in contempt and state, “you bourgeois assholes don’t deserve my art.”

Go outside and use money to pay neighborhood kids to beat up the audience members as they leave venue.
Eat a box of crayons and then make out with a clown.

Chapter 7

2009-11-04T17:47:00.012-05:00

“Fair” Isaac Coleman had umpired the local sandlot games for nearly forty years, but the neighborhood children were finding his calls more bric-a-brac now, totem-weary in their unbidden flotsam. And besides, baseball wasn’t as popular as it had once been. Skating, football, sundry skadoodles, and video games had taken its place in the life of the American child, lately pickle-framed and burdened with all manner of unwagging demystifications.

Knuckled and jumping now, the town boys bypassed the dry pastures, ever-searching for endeavors more severe, both in intensity and brevity; the evolution of their weltschmerz prompting goatees in those as young as forty-five one-hundredths score.

The television limped now. All around, the cathodes arrested and fell silent, poisoning the fruits of Cartwright. Games of distraction now replaced games of edification. Yet Isaac remained, determined to bring the children to his beloved game.

Chapwood, urine-pleated pants and Hawaiian shirt, puffed towards the old sandlot, carrying with him the dismay of bad knees and forgotten childhood dreams. The children who remained were joyless to Chapwood. Piss and twist, down and out, black and blue, Jack and Diane, he thrust his core moundward, unwavered in his disdain of propriety as newly defined by club-headed capuchin wranglers whose unfearingness of bites and tosses confounded even the most retarded of mouth-breathers in all of Chapwood’s half-remembered realities.

Having clubbed old Isaac into a coma with the bat, Chapwood’s mind unjointed and crisped to nearer humidity. Yet the world still spun in foolish ways of organized unsense. To this, reconciliation was still unlikely. Undesirable as well. The children meanwhile had skitched, three wide, towards the neon thoroughfare.

Chapwood, mildly sentient now (in relative terms of course), was able at the very least to pro-actively quest.

The piss flaked off, the pleats unfurling. Finally, he could breathe.

Political Science

2009-11-04T16:28:00.002-05:00

a = b
a² = ab
a² - b² = ab-b²
(a-b)(a+b) = b(a-b)
a+b = b
b+b = b
2b = b
2 = 1

Shit That Doesn't Impress Me

2009-11-03T16:45:00.011-05:00

Your ability to eat really spicy food.
That time you were so bombed you did something far more interesting to you than it is to me.
How much you enjoy pot. Wow, you’re a fuckin’ rebel.
Your car. Unless it doubles as a submarine, the only thing about your car I care about is that it might indicate to me whether or not you’re a sucker.
The beach. It's oppressively hot, it smells bad, the water's disgusting.
That band you discovered that no one else has heard of yet.
Also Radiohead. Fuck those guys.
How much you can bench. You’re full of shit anyway.
Your nonsensical pseudo-reason for rooting for a sports franchise from another city even though you’ve lived here your whole life.
How you are above the petty competitiveness of sports. Except for soccer. You love soccer. Fuck you! Explain the offside rule then.
Your brand spanking new gadget that doesn’t even have a proper application yet. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. You paid too much for it and can’t do anything with it yet, you early adopting fool. But hey, thanks for driving down the price for the rest of us when the thing actually becomes useful.
Nature. I appreciate the aesthetics of trees, mountains, animals, landscapes. But what exactly is supposed to happen if I stare at it for thirty minutes instead of five? No, seriously. Does it do a fucking trick?
Your tattoo(s). You’re an idiot, not a rebel. My grandfather had tattoos. Congratulations. Maybe you can tell a story about how much cheaper tattoos were when you got yours compared to today. And if you think you’re making a statement, let me tell you that you are. The statement is, “I’m trying to make a statement, because I’m afraid my personality is utterly incapable of interesting other people. Please be my friend/follower/afraid of me because I'm really afraid of you.” You also can't donate blood for a year in most states you selfish asshole.
People who agree with this entire list. Don't you have a mind of your own?
Texas.
Your hobby. Nobody cares. You started it because you needed something to do when the rest of us aren’t around. Don’t start infecting real-people-time with your solitary horseshit.
Blogging. What the Hell am I doing here?
You. Why are you fucking reading this? Because I told you I was special? I’m also Jesus Christ. Seriously.
Send me money.

Me

2009-11-02T21:28:00.000-05:00

My name says it all!

Listen To Me!

2009-11-02T17:01:00.004-05:00

I’m very special. I first learned this as a young child when my mother informed me of this attribute...or it might have been a teacher...I can’t remember just now...I may have just seen it on one of those TV programmes we’ve all heard about.

Anyway, point is I was born with this and then I went to school for a bunch of years...at least ten. I can’t remember just now. Something like that. And I’ve read some books...often to the last page. So, I’m qualified here to speak to you about the things.

Well, rest assured that here you will get the most expert of information from someone not like most. Look to me and be enlightened. I shall strive to best harness and broadcast these truths and profundities to you in responsible matters most well-intentioned.

Important things are coming. I shall give them to you with a diamond drill bit. Penetrating, sagacious, and shiny.

Post #93

2009-11-01T14:23:00.004-05:00

I'm starting off with my 93rd post as I have authored 92 posts in hard copy which have been immolated to my novice status in tribute to the great god of Blogging, Hermes.

Continuing where we left off:

Spindle-twisted, Chapwood zagged down the launcher, peerless; driven from his cubby by the static-infested intrusion of pulsing normalcy.

Stampeded.

Lying now, he let out every milliliter of breath and pissed himself.